I certainly don't suggest that you should, and I apologize if I gave the impression that I was angling for help on that scale. At this point, I strongly suspect that the 770 is not capable of browsing the internet via cable connection to a LAN, unless the LAN as well as the 770 is specifically configured to accept the connection.

This is not based on any understanding of networks or of the 770's internal workings. A better-informed member might reply on the lines of : "Sure you can do it. I used to plug mine into hotel internet ports everywhere I went." However, so far nobody claims to have done it, in all the years that the 770 has been around. When such an obviously useful adaptation remains uncelebrated, there are grounds to doubt whether it is in fact achievable. I would not ask you or anyone to spend time on a search that holds so little promise.

As you point out, there are probably not many people still depending on the 770. The times when it makes a real difference in my life are when I am travelling five or more time zones away from home. That is at most three weeks in a year. The rest of the time, it is a nice toy but nothing more. There are nearly always alternatives to the wired hotel-room connection, even if they are more expensive or need some forethought. (For example, I should have bought more prepaid GSM phone vouchers in Italy last year before going to Switzerland.) Bearing all these things in mind, it makes no sense for either of us to put more time and money into this problem.

There is one last thing that might be worth asking about. Kate Alhola mentions that the RTL8150 has been used with the 770, but she does not actually say that the relevant driver is "natively" present, whereas she does use that expression with regard to the 810. Maybe people injected a customized driver in the 770 when they set it up for networking. Even if the driver is supposed to be present, I might have done something to incapacitate it. Is there a simple way of finding out whether it is in fact present? My dmesg contains nothing to indicate that the 770 recognizes the RTL8150.