I purchased an HP 1030NR, because, IMHO, they are the sexiest netbooks currently on the market. They are sleek, lightweight, and they don’t have a wonkey keyboard layout like some netbooks (I’m looking at you, ASUS).

One problem: the onboard nic controller (Marvell 88E8040 adapter, sky2 kernel module) doesn’t quite work right on a default install of Ubuntu 9.04. Sometimes it works, sometimes it’s not even detected (you can’t see it listed when you type lspci). Sometimes it’s detected, and works, but locks the machine up if you unplug your network cable. Not cool.

After some digging around, I found that there is an easy way to fix this. Edit /boot/grub/menu.list, find the line that says something like this: # defoptions=quiet splash, add acpi_os_name=Linux at the end of the line, save the file, and type update-grub. Reboot, and viola, it should work normally from now on.