[lug] Help request: Not able to activate networking on recovery mode. Ubuntu 11.10

[Ryan J Nicholson]

Pablo,

I'd skip recovery mode, and boot up an 11.10 live CD. That way, you
can 100% rule out hardware problems (does it work with the live CD?),
and even better, you can restore your packages to a consistent state
from a chroot.

This is what I'd do:

1) Boot 11.10 off of a live CD or USB stick.
2) Make sure networking works from the graphical desktop, make sure
you can get to the Internet.
3) Open a shell/terminal and get a root prompt:

sudo -i

4) Mount your local hard disk, whatever partition you've installed
11.10 to. Let's say /dev/sda1.

mount /dev/sda1 /mnt

5) Chroot into that filesystem, and mount /proc so you will have
Internet access:

cd /mnt
chroot ./
mount -t proc /proc proc

Try to ping an Internet host after this step, by IP address and then by name:

ping 66.35.48.49
ping lug.boulder.co.us

If that works..great! (and if not, check route and /etc/resolv.conf...)

6) Now you can apt-get update. Since you were pinning, delete or
rename /etc/apt/preferences.

mv /etc/apt/preferences /etc/apt/old.preferences
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade

7) At this point, you should have the most recent 11.10 packages, and
everything should be in a consistent state. Back out of your chroot:

umount /proc
Ctrl-D to exit chroot

and reboot the machine.

Does it come up properly? I hope so.

Good luck,

Ryan