Hello, first poster here.

I had a question concerning my Asus k53ta laptop. At the moment is is dual booting with win7/Linux Mint Debian xfce. They are dual booted in a way that the partitions and boot is separated (that way when windows updates it doesn't disrupt my boot for linux) Anyway I had just installed an new modem and wireless router. The connection and internet capabilities were fine for about 5 hours. Then mid-browsing my connection shut down. but only for the internet connection. the torrents and downloads I had going were fine and the network connection said I was connected with an excellent signal.

Now for the next part confusing me. when I use windows 7 it works fine. I can connect and browse and all the fun stuff. But when I use a live cd the network issue continues. that is I get an excellent connection, download/torrents work, but no internet browsing. I have tried using live LMDE, OpenSUSE 11.3/11.4, Linux Mint 9/10/11, and CentOS 6. all versions can connect but not allow browsing.

Also when starting up LMDE xfce it says
"could not look up internet address for kong_territory. This will prevent xfce from operating correctly. It may be possible to correct this problem by adding kong_territory to the file /etc/hosts on your system." (kong_territory is the name of my computer, the network I'm connecting to is a standard belkin.### Also when looking for that location I am unable to find a directory called hosts.)

As a side note my friends netbook (dual booting vista/Linux mint 11) is able to connect just fine under either OS.

Anyone have an idea whats going on? why does it affect most (I haven't tried all of them) of my live CDs, then next is there any remedies for this situation. The concept of reformatting linux isn't making much sense as none of my live versions function correctly.

Btw I would still declared my self a linux newb, so if you need more info (from a command or something) could you please list the command?

Note: just tested my favorite live distro Puppy linux and i am able to browse through that. (still clueless though as i only use Puppy as a live distro, why is deb,suse,ubuntu,and redhat(cent) not working?)

This sounds like a DNS problem.

The file /etc/resolv.conf should have the nameservers IP addresses in it. Nameservers IP's can be supplied by your ISP or you can use public free ones.

You did not say how you have your network set up. Some routers, will pass to the host systems DNS IP's and the linux systems will store it in /etc/resolv.conf. This happens when you do a DHCP request.

You can try a manual update of /etc/resolv.conf. Enter these addresses into resolv.conf ( you have to be root ) and save the file, and try your network connection again.

These are all public nameservers. You can use your ISP's in there place. You can test it with a browser, or try a ping to something like yahoo; 'ping www.yahoo.com' . If the ping works, the name service resolved the name to an IP.

Resolve.conf gets overwritten when your system gets an IP in most cases. So it may be the your router is not set up correctly.

Hope this helps.