GNU/Linux Desktop Survival Guide by Graham Williams
Desktop Survival Project Home Preface Advocacy History Distributions Installation Basic Survival Wajig Audio AbiWord APM Backup Bash Booting Cameras CD Chinese ChRoot Clock Commercial Conference Management Configuration CRON CVS Databases DIA Directories Disks Documentation DVD Email Eye of Gnome Evolution File Systems Firewalls Floppy Disks Fonts Ghemical GIMP Glade Gnome GnuCash Gnumeric GQView Graphics Groups HTML Editors ImageMagick Initialisations on Booting Java KDE Kernels Keyboard Konqueror KVM Switch LaTeX Log System Login Magellan Mathematics Memory Modems Mounting Devices MS/Windows Music MySQL Nautilus Networks NFS NT File System OpenOffice.org Oracle Packages Partitions Passwords PDF Photos PPP Presentations Printing Python R Remote Desktops Rsync Samba Scanning Science Security SH File System Sketch Spell SPlus Spruce SSH SUDO Subversion Swap Themes USB Video Virtualization Web Word X XML Sample Installations Troubleshooting Index

Networking

During an install DHCP will be attempted to obtain your network information from a DHCP server. This (usually) requires that you identify your host as a host that your DHCP server knows or relies on the DHCP server allocating the next available IP address. Do so just to see if there is a DHCP server available to you.

If a DHCP server is not available then you will be prompted for alternative options, including manually setting up the appropriate network information.

Generally you need the following, where some sample addresses are supplied:

  IP       155.229.8.165
  Netmask  255.255.255.192
  Gateway  155.229.8.190
  Domain   togaware.com
  DNS      183.44.72.1

The information is recorded in /etc/network/interfaces and /etc/resolv.conf. Later on edit /etc/resolv.conf to add search togaware.com so that you can refer to your local machines by their name, without fully specifying the domain.

Some useful commands for trouble shooting are:

  # netstat -n
  # ifconfig -a