Hello everybody! I am sick of Windows; Looking for a better OS!
 

I have had it uup to my nose with Windows and Now am very serious about useing Linux from now on!

I have a A+ Certificate but haven't used the knowledge in some years.

Question: I am unable to make my Toshiba Satelite W/Linux 11 see the internet connectionand I need some help. The network connection is not active anddos not show an activate button to make it so.



Help!



Austin

which distribution have you installed?

Which Linux distribution are you using? What model of Toshiba Satellite laptop do you have? Are you trying to get the wired LAN port or wireless to work?

You can usually find out what network interfaces have drivers by using these commands from a terminal prompt.

sudo su -
ifconfig -a

You will normally see "eth0" for the first wired LAN port and "wlan0" for the first wireless LAN port.

The first command switches to a root shell prompt and you only need to do that once after you start the terminal program.

To find out what hardware is in the computer you can use this command.

lspci | more

Press Enter to advance one line or space to display the next page.

In order to connect to the Internet through a broadband router you normally configure the network settings to use DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol). Each distro may be a little different but there is often a file like "/etc/rc.d/rc.inet1.conf" that you can edit to change the settings. You can tell if the network interface has an IP address by looking with "ifconfig".

ifconfig -a

If your wired or wireless network device is not seen at all then you will probably have to install a driver or press a button on your laptop to enable the device.

For a wireless LAN you may need to install or configure software such as "wpa-supplicant" in order to configure the encryption. If there is no Linux driver for your wireless or wired LAN hardware you can sometimes run the Windows driver using "ndiswrapper" for Linux. Laptops can sometimes be a little more difficult to get working with wireless and sound in Linux.

Software based "controllerless" dial-up modems such as Connexant modems in laptops also may not work with Linux. If you're using dial-up for Internet then it will be easier if you get a USB hardware modem that doesn't require special software.

Provide more details about your exact hardware and Linux distribution and you will get much better help.

Thanks Eric for your help.

I have a Toshiba Satelite P205D-S7438. I am using Linux version 11. I use comcast high speed internet (Comcast doesn't support Linux). I am trying to get my connection through the Lan and router on my desk but will very soon configure a wireless.

I have tried several of the suggestions you listed above but the password I am using, isn't working. I have used the "root" and the secondary password I set up with no access.

Austin

Again, which Linux distribution are you using? "Linux 11" isn't a distribution- looking for something like Slackware, Fedora, Ubuntu, etc....

I think he is referring to Fedora 11 or openSUSE maybe?

You can see how new I am to this. Fedora!

I could go on about how I don't really consider the A+ to be anything meaningful but I won't, I would say it's not really something worth mentioning alone as the only source of technical expertise.

Are we talking about a wired or wireless connection? I am presuming wireless but it makes quite a bit of difference depending on the answer.

There are GUI tools in KDE or Gnome for setting up networking devices, but as I don't use fedora and the closest thing I have open right now is a VNC connection (over SSH) to a CentOS server I can't exactly write a guide up of how to get them right now I am afraid.