I have a r8169 realtek network card. When I boot from USB Live OS there is no internet. If I install there is still no internet. I have found the r8169 driver in the repos and using a second USB tried to makepkg but it said it couldn’t find fakeroot. So how do I get online?
My motherboard is ASRock Steel Legend and it’s a couple of years old. Nothing unpopular or extremely new. Why no driver?
The r8169 driver is the mainline kernel driver and is already included in the installed kernel. However, for some people, that driver doesn’t work, and then you have to use the r8168 driver instead. This driver should normally come installed by default with the kernel, but it is a separate package ─ e.g. for the 5.4 kernel, it is linux54-r8168. Similar packages exist for the different kernel versions.
ASRock has produced a number of motherboards with model name Steel Legend
Please post more system information
inxi -Fazy