Apparently there is an upstream fix for this RTL8139 problem. I tried a floppy-booted install of Debian Sarge (version 3.1) which recognized the 8139D just fine. That Debian distribution had trouble partitioning one of my hard disk drives to ext3 so I created the boot, root and network driver floppies for the current beta of Debian Etch (version 4.0). That 2.6.18-4-486 kernel had no trouble with the Realtek card nor the partitioning so I did a full install of that distribution. Now I have my network back.
Chuck -- kubuntu 6.06 LTS does not support Realtek 8139 network card https://launchpad.net/bugs/48456 -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs