I just bought a Lenovo T420, I booted the live CD and couldn't connect to my wireless router so I figured I needed the drivers for it. I have the last version of Ubuntu(12.04).

It's a Intel® 82579 Gigabit Ethernet Controller

So I went on intel's website and downloaded the Drivers for Linux and compiled them with make install. Here's the tutorial I followed: Linux Driver Install

I have a few question though,

What are these doing :

modprobe e1000e
ifconfig eth0 up
dhclient eth0
ping intel.com

As far as what I've read, modprobe seems to add the driver to the list of drivers for the kernel, but is that operation only good for one session? The two other lines, I don't understand either what they are doing.

What does he mean at the end when he mentions :

Note: Whenever the kernel version is upgraded you will need rebuild this driver.

And are these steps permanent? Or do I have to add them to some boot.conf file for everytime I boot.

Anyways, the steps worked for me and I have established a connection with my router, I just need to know if I need to do additional steps to keep the driver permanently etc.