Give wicd a try (network-manager alternative)!
Monday, December 31st, 2007Setting up an Ubuntu the first time, I always struggled with the network-manager, because it wasn’t able to establish a connection with a fixed gateway address. I have an old – hmm let me say disabled – router from Siemens where it is not possible to use DHCP because it doesn’t provide the gateway address. So my only chance to get wireless lan to work was to provide the correct ips manually in ubuntu’s configuration files, and do a sudo ifconfig down eth1 and sudo ifconfig up eth0 to switch between WLAN and LAN. Really annoying!
Just for the case you are interested in configurating your network manually, this are the two files where the magic happens: /etc/network/interfaces and /etc/resolv.conf
But without any regret I can recommend wicd. This tool is so handy I am wondering why it isn’t the default network-manager in Ubuntu! Just add the repository deb http://apt.wicd.net gutsy extras to your sources.list and install it via sudo aptitude install wicd. I am running the current testing release 1.3.8 from 02. Dec 2007 and it’s working fine!