Internet slow, gaim can't connect
 

I installed Ubuntu last week and was having trouble with my Internet connection. Firefox was really sluggish and pages loaded really slow—sometimes several minutes. I followed the Ubuntu setup guide and altered the firefox config file as suggested and it did help a little. The thing was, I could not get gaim to connect; it would just time-out after a few minutes.

Then, just out of curiosity, I downloaded kubuntu and installed it. Both the browser and instant message program worked fine, but after a few days I decided I really didn't like KDE so I reinstalled ubuntu. Yet, once again: sluggish Internet browsing and gaim not working.

I was wondering if it simply had to do with hardware detection, my Ethernet connection is on-board on a Abit IC7-G motherboard. I don't know if I need drivers or what.

Thanks for any help.

If you have any connectivity at all, then your card is detected. What do the ifconfig -aand route commands show? Do you have DNS set up correctly?Is Firefox slower when it's doing "looking up host", "connecting to host", or is it just generally slow all of the time?

This is what I got from my iconfig:

eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:50:8D:F1:52:FE
inet addr:192.168.0.2 Bcast:192.168.0.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
inet6 addr: fe80::250:8dff:fef1:52fe/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:9421 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:7978 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:12339518 (11.7 MiB) TX bytes:815460 (796.3 KiB)
Base address:0xb000 Memory:fc000000-fc020000

lo Link encap:Local Loopback
inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0
inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1
RX packets:2791 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:2791 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:253876 (247.9 KiB) TX bytes:253876 (247.9 KiB)

As for DNS, I'm not sure what that is. How do I check if it is set up correctly?

And for the last question, it seems kind of slow most of the time. Also, I was following the set up guide and sometimes It would time out sometimes when trying to get packages.

Nothing looks too wrong with that set-up, but what does the route command show? You can check your DNS configuration by making sure that your nameservers are listed in /etc/resolv.conf, the format being:

nameserver <IP of name server>

How do I open the resolv.conf file?

Open a terminal window and type "cat /etc/resolv.conf". To edit the file you can use a text editor like emacs, vi, or nano. I'd suggest nano since it's pretty newbie-friendly -- at least compared to vi or emacs.

Okay, I did as you suggested and this is what it displayed in the terminal:

But, I couldn't get it to open in an editor.

What I don't understand is why it worked okay in KDE and not gnome. I even tried a KDE Live CD and everything worked okay. I'd used if I have to, but I really don't like it.