Internet Connection with Ubuntu 8.10 on Mac Pro

[Chris Mohler]

On Tue, Sep 8, 2009 at 7:40 PM, Minty Busby<serendipity.g3a at gmail.com> wrote:
> A quick idea .. I saw a USB to ethernet adapter on Amazon and eBay .. I
> could plug my ethernet cable into that instead.  would that make it any
> easier?  Would Ubuntu 8.10 with no updates recognise that long enough for me
> to download the updates?

I'd find the chipset if possible and Google the chipset plus linux in
the same search and see what turns up.  I've used one before that
worked (have no idea where it is now to check the make/model - sorry),
but (I think) I recall others having trouble with them.

Are you 100% sure that the ethernet cable is good?  If so, open a
terminal and type 'tail -f /var/log/messages' (no quotes), then plug
in the cable.  Is anything else reported in the terminal after
plugging it in?

You could also poke around in dmesg for errors. Something like
dmesg | grep -i error
dmesg | grep -i net
dmesg | grep -i ethernet
etc...

or just 'dmesg | less' to scroll through the whole mess.  And you did
give a lot if info, but not the chipset of your network adapter.  Type
'sudo lshw -c net' to get all of the gory details and paste those back
to the mailing list.

Chris