Hey there,

Installing Debian 6 x64 was successful, but DHCP autoconfig failed (on a hard line), though networking and wireless were fine on ubuntu natty. I'm not sure how to manually set it up. Could someone point me in the right direction?

Hello and Welcome to LinuxQuestions,

Debian has pretty good and complete documentation. The following links will help you out for sure:
Chapter 5. Network setup
Debian Wiki: Network Configuration

Looking forward to your participation. Have fun with Linux.

Kind regards,

Eric

1 members found this post helpful.

Thanks, that got me started.

I can network on hard line, but am now wrestling with wireless. I've had to get wireless going a couple times on a Dell machine, but never a Toshiba.

Toshiba seems to be [annoyingly] tight-lipped when it comes to the chip model and manufacturer, near as I can tell, so information was hard to come by.

Nonetheless, I found some some things to indicate that it could be Realtek, or Intel, or Aetheros, so I went ahead and got firmware-iwlwifi, firmware-aetheros, firmware-realtek, firmware-ipw2x00 and for good measure, firmware-linux-free (+nonfree)

some restarts and fiddling later. . . still no dice, and iwconfig says that I have no wireless extensions

any ideas?

Hello,

The first thing you'll need to do is find out what wireless NIC you have on your laptop. It's not a good idea to install lots of drivers (which all might be the wrong ones) just hoping to get the right one. You'll only put unnecessary stuff in your system. Just run the following and post the output relevant to the wireless NIC, to see if your card gets detected correctly:
You might have to use sudo with that to get full results.

Kind regards,

Eric