Mr Ethernet, he dead.

Been ruing 14.04 without incident (and loving it!) on a Lenovo G480 for two years... and then I decided to jump the gun and install 16.04. Clean install... but left with crippled Etheet unable to coect. Having searched high and low elsewhere for a solution, I did a clean install of 14.04. Same result: no working Etheet. For what it's worth, I believe this Lenovo uses an alx driver.

FYI:
$ ifconfig
eth0 Link encap:Etheet HWaddr dc:0e:a1:f4:39:13
inet addr:192.168.8.2 Bcast:192.168.8.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
inet6 addr: fe80::de0e:a1ff:fef4:3913/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:10 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:219 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:1172 (1.1 KB) TX bytes:22103 (22.1 KB)
Interrupt:16

lo Link encap:Local Loopback
inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0
inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:65536 Metric:1
RX packets:162 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:162 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:11058 (11.0 KB) TX bytes:11058 (11.0 KB)

What gives? Can anyone help me get online? Thanks.