As a result of mishaps (failed dependencies and such) during an upgrade, I am now in a situation where ifconfig shows only lo. No eth0, no wlan0 (on a laptop running wireless). I've installed wicd (not easy when you don't have a net connection) but when I start it, it gives a "failed" message.

Before the upgrade, my wireless was working fine. It still works fine in my Windows partition.

I could go through the history of how I got here, but it probably isn't very relevant to solving the problem I now have. I assume I need to reconstruct some network-related files in /etc -- but which ones? And what should I put in them?

Once I've gotten eth0 and wlan0 back, I assume my next step should be to try wicd again.

What does "ifconfig -a" show?

ifconfig -a includes entries for pan0 and vboxnet0, but still nothing for eth0, ath0, wlan0, or anything like that.

are you sure you have the driver installed? what card do you have?

download linux:
and bunzip and untar it, the execute

then go to device drivers

then network device

and try to find it, and select it as a module (type "m" when selected), you can also press "?" to get info on the selected thing, the look for something like this: "if you compile this as a module, choose M here, the module will be called <name of the module>"

then pres escape until you get out and remeber to save the config

then execute:

hope that helps

Probably dumb questions here, but did you do

I tried both of those. The effect was to create an eth0 item in the ifconfig list, but no connection. And the item did not survive a reboot.

ifconfig wlan0 up did nothing except to produce an error message.

If it came up then you probably have a good driver.
which command brought it up?
What was the IP address and default gateway after it came up?
can you bring it back up and then do and post the results back here in your thread?
Also if you can see the IP and the default gateway try to ping them to see if you have any connectivity and post short versions of those ping tests here

I got the wired connection back by inserting an entry for eth0 in /etc/network/interfaces. However, I've had no such luck with the wireless connection. I inserted an entry for ath0 in that same table and even added ath0_pci to the list of modules in /etc/modules, but still can't get the connection working. I'm about ready to save my home directory, ditch the existing installation, and install the KDE 3.5 version of Jaunty from the beginning.