Ubuntu – No Internet 10.04

10.0411.10fedoramintwireless

Here's my story, short as possible:

It all started two years ago when two laptops with Windows became unusable. I had nothing to lose, and went for a clean install of Ubuntu. We were thrilled with the results, and have been until Monday.

Monday, I decided to buy a desktop off Craigslist (the laptops are now old), and just pop Ubuntu 10.04 on it from the same install CD.

Everything went fine, and the computer was running smooth, until i discovered I couldn't plug in my ethernet cable for internet.

I played with the Network tool (in the status bar), and also Network Tool.

I put in my IP manually, and eventually it said it was connected, and showed activity, but I still had no internet.

Being busy with work, I never intended to use the ethernet anyway, and bought a USB adaptor for $10 off Amazon which was recommended as "trouble free." (Raylink RT5372 USB)

It doesn't work. I tried downloading the driver, and compiling the .bz2 file into a .tar and installing from the terminal. Didn't get any errors, but it isn't working.

As potential solutions, I downloaded, and installed:

  • Fedora
  • Mint
  • Ubuntu 11.10

My Raylink wireless card worked fine with any and all of those distros, but it seems that my ATI Radeon 9200 graphics card isn't very compatible, and the computer slows to a crawl.

I've been poking around the internet all week looking for, and trying, possible solutions.

Any advice?

Best Answer

All of the other distros you have tried have newer kernels that 10.04.

It is very likely that your problems can be traced back to this.

Fortunately, 10.04 has the Oneiric (11.10) kernel backported and available to be installed.

Since you have no internet connectivity, you will need to either:

  1. Remove your hard-drive and and plug this into a computer that has a different NIC which you can connect to the internet with. Use the linked question above to install the PPA and the latest kernel
  2. Download the backported packages manually, transfer to your computer and install.

If you choose choice 2 - download the image package appropriate to your architecture

i.e. 32bit and 64bit

then install using the syntax:

sudo dpkg -i [foo].deb where [foo] is the package filename

You can check that you have boot correctly with this newer kernel via uname -a

enter image description here

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