Re enabling Auto eth0 after making a newbie mistake
 

Hello all,

As you may see i am new to this forum and linux itself (tried Ubuntu 8.10, now on Ubuntu 10.4), and i would appreciate your assistance with a newbie mistake i have made.

While working around with ndiswrapper, trying to get my Broadcom wireless driver to work, a tutorial i was reading said that the default wired connection, Auto eth0, could interfere with the windows driver, and gave instructions on how to disable it. Without thinking, i disabled it and now i have no internet to search for a way to fix it. right now im using a friends computer. i have searched and tried to fix it myself and have not found the solution yet. Since i love forums, and find most help from them, i ask for help enabling the default wired network.

The command that killed it as i recall was something like: "sudo killall dhclient" or something, there was also one after it, but i cannot remember it. ive tried restarting multiple times, and not even the ndiswrapper driver would enable.

Any help would be appreciated
...and im betting a simple terminal command will fix it, huh?

P.S. I love linux, but apparently linux doesnt like acer laptops :(

Welcome to Linux Syek0sis re: dhclient
 

I've used Linux on a couple Acer laptops. Yes Linux does love them. I'm not on one right now though. You just gotto play with it.
OK, the dhclient you are referring to is standard Debian/Ubuntu stuff. If you've lost it with 'sudo killall dhclient' then you can recover it by typing 'sudo dhclient.' It might grumble for some options and refer you to the man pages or help pages. To know if it's running, open a new terminal and type the command 'top'
On the left side of the terminal you'll see the names of programs running. This is very useful when you want to kill unruly programs. the biggest power drains will be there at the top. Once its running, type 'n' to set the maximum number of running programs to display. Oh, and you don't need to plug ndiswrapper into dhclient. It should just work with the right configuration.
On the matter of wifi, you could check the hardware compatibility list because many new linux users use ndiswrapper unnecessarily. I for example simply had to run 'sudo apt-get install rt73' to get mine to work, but didn't know that when I was a noob, hell I'm still a noob at many things.
Do me a favor, open a terminal, type 'lspci' and paste the results into a reply here. I'll look deeper into it later. Get in the habit with hardware issues, of pasting lscpi output in the post. It saves time of me having to ask you to do it. Welcome to linux, Virus-free surfing, entire system updates with one click, tons of free help, and if it don't work, call up ubuntu, tell em you want your money back LOL.

If you can still see your network icon, right click it and select Edit Connections. You should see a tab for the wired connection. Your eth0 should be listed here, highlight it then click Edit.

Check that Connect automatically has a tick in the box.

Check you have a MAC address entry.

MTU should be set to automatic

Make sure you have a tick in Available to all users

Under the IPv4 Settings, the Method should be set to Automatic (DHCP).

Click Apply, close the network connections window. Left click on the network icon, you should see Wired Network if it says disconnected click it and see if it connects, failing that do a reboot and see if that works.