I need to set up a small p2p network between a windows machine and a linux machine running ubuntu 9.04. I am using Wicd to manage my networks and created an ad-hoc network. I am able to connect to it locally using:

ssh username@localhost
and using:
ssh username@IP

where IP is the ip address I assigned to the ubuntu machine when I started the ad hoc network. I am able to connect to the network with my windows machine, but I can't access the ubuntu machine. I noticed that the windows machine doesn't have an IP in the range that the network is on, and I am guessing that that means dchp isn't going on the ubuntu machine. Do I need to assign an address to fix this? If so, how?

Rather than use DCHP, I just used a static IP on both machines. After setting up the ad-hoc network in linux using wicd, I manually changed my address in Windows and used the IP of the network (which was also my linux machine) as the default gateway. Because I was only dealing with IPs, I didn't need any DNS.