What is the easiest way to share wired connection with wireless in ubuntu 11.10?
 

I am running Ubuntu 11.10 and have other wifi devices such as mobile phone and a tablet. Does anyone knows a better way of sharing my wired ethernet connection eth0 with my wlan? I want my wireless interface to act as a gateway for my other devices. I have seen some wiki on using network manager and firestarter but was wondering if there is an easier way of doing it. Maybe a package that can be installed that will take care of the hard part. Thanks.

You will hopefully be able to do this simply from the network manager GUI.

The idea is to add a shared wireless connection from network manager. Obviously it will need an SSID, and security settings would be advisable. It will need to be running in "ad-hoc" mode (set in the 'Wireless' tab), and "shared to other users" method (set in the 'IPv4' tab), and "available to all users" (also set in the 'IPv4' tab).

Note that there are some wireless cards that will not work in ad-hoc mode.

There was also some issue with Ubuntu and dnsmasq, not sure of the current state; the Ubuntu community help pages show how to deal with this.

When I tried this, I set the security settings to None as my Ipad will not connect if I turn on any security settings. I manage to make it work and it can connect but the problem is that I can't seem to browse anything. I can connect to internal network though using the web browser (for example, my router config) butI cannot seem to go out and browse anything. I have also installed dnsmasq-base as suggested on the wiki but no use.

I assume I need to setup DHCP and DNS so that the clients that will be connecting will have the proper IP address and DNS but I don't know how to do that.

If the problem was the IP address (given out by DHCP), then you wouldn't expect to be able to access the router. You can test external website access without DNS by using actual IP addresses, eg you can access the archive.org server (at least the entry page) through the following browser address:
In order to forward the DNS, you will need to get dnsmasq working. At the very least, you may have to reboot after installing dnsmasq.

Alternatively, you can just manually set the DNS addresses in the iPad, either to the router's IP address (since most routers will be set up to forward your service provider's DNS addresses), or to a third party DNS (such as Google's DNS service at 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4).