Yep, Ubuntu is Feisty alright..

OK, so over the weekend I broke my PC. Anyone who knows me would not be a bit surprised. I'm a little OCD when it comes to computers, and I am constantly tinkering with them. I suppose if I was born in the 40's, I would be one of those guys with a souped up chevy or something.

I bought a 3D graphics card card from ebay, and installed it over the weekend. It worked just fine, so I pushed in and tried to set up Beryl (think Windows Vista, only better). Well, when I rebooted I got the famous "X windows no longer works, sorry kid, nice try" and a prompt.

Most Linux jocks wouldn't be a bit phased by this, but I'm lost without a GUI. I'm an old time DOS hack, but my memory just doesn't work well enough these days to memorize a new operating system, so I did what anyone else would do. I resigned myself to the fact I lost all my stuff (yea, I know, I should have backups) and re-installed.

I figured that my piecemeal method of getting 3d to work versus a fresh install where Linux handles setting up my card is the better choice anyways. Well, it worked great, and I was up and running again. I flew through my wireless card setup thanks to my trusty USB that had the drivers, and a copy of the web page I used to fight through it the first time.

Once I got it all running, I popped up the "updater", and noticed that "Feisty" had been released over the weekend. Feisty is Ubuntu 7.x, with better support for things like Wireless and 3D. Well, I think you know me by now - I hit "upgrade" and it did.

The download/upgrade process took a little over 3 hours, with minimal babysitting on my part. I re-booted and "wham", it came right up!.. "excellent" (think Bill & Ted)

I had a good strong signal on my wireless, I had the new NetworkManager up and running, it saw my router without any problems, and I jumped into Firefox. Alas, too good to be true. "www.msn.com not found".

After some fiddling, I determined that I have a connection, but no IP addrees. I mis-concluded that I needed my old driver, so I went about de-installing the new stuff, and installing the old stuff. After a second re-boot, I had lost all connectivity. CRAP!

Now, I had to put all the new stuff back, and back out the changes I made. This took a while, as I had to figure out exactly what I did to break it, and what was installed before I messed with it. Lucky I also have a windows laptop that works, for me to look up these issues on the web.

Anywhom....

After hours of messing around, I was about to give up when I came across "dhclient". This is different that the standard dhcp program. Once I had my connectivity back, and could see that I was connected to my router, I popped up a terminal window and typed " sudo dhclient ra0", and "viola", it worked, firefox was off and running.

Now, I had to figure out how to get that command in the startup process. I edited the init file and added it to the end and it worked fine - under KDE, not Gnome. CRAP! again.

Turns out that the cool new NetworkManager only gets in the way on Gnome, you have to remove it for this to work. Hopefully a new version will take care of it. When I uninstalled NetworkManager, everything worked fine.

Now, the real work starts.. I need to rebuild my kid(s) environments too, anyone remember what my 8 year olds Painted Penguins name was??????