Internet access problem

[Markus Schönhaber]

R Page-Jones:

> When I put wget http://www.google.com in the command I get: 
> robin at robin-desktop:~$ wget http://www.google.com --2009-11-09
> 19:48:47--  http://www.google.com/ Resolving www.google.com...
> 1.0.0.0 Connecting to www.google.com|1.0.0.0|:80...

Not even remotely good. You should never see a public name
resolved to the address 1.0.0.0 (hm, and I thought we had name
resolution already eliminated from the list of possible problems).
Please show the output of (on the command line)
cat /etc/hosts
and
cat /etc/resolv.conf

> If I click update manager and then click the "check" box  it says 
> "Downloading Package Information". After a couple of minutes a
> message comes up "An Error Has Occurred" with the following details: 
> W: Failed to fetch 
> http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/karmic/Release.gpg Cannot
> initiate the connection to gb.archive.ubuntu.com:80 
> (2a01:450:10:1::10). - connect (101: Network is unreachable) [IP:
> 2a01:450:10:1::10 80]

Hm, interesting. gb.archive.ubuntu.com is resolved to a correct
address. Although it doesn't help you much since you've probably have no
IPv6 connectivity. What does
host gb.archive.ubuntu.com
show?
If you go to
System/Administration/Software Sources
an change "Download from:" to "Main server", does "check" in update
manager work better?

> As an experiment I put an xubuntu 9.40 live CD into my computer. The
>  program came up OK and connected to the internet without any
> problems. I checked out a few web addresses and navigated round the
> web a bit to check out the operation. All was OK.. (xubantu  8.04
> also accesses the internet without any problem.)

Which confirms that it's a configuration problem.
Did your network access ever work on this Ubuntu install?

-- 
Regards
  mks