I returned to my experiments with Feisty Fawn early this morning. To recap a bit, after installing it on my PC yesterday, I got a message saying ""GRUB loading, please wait... Error 18."

This time, before beginning the installation, I changed the BIOS setting for the hard drive from LBA to auto, this being one of the suggestions I saw on a mailing list.  This did no good, so the next time I partitioned the hard drive manually, allocating a small boot partition as the first slice. I left it to install while I went to bed.

After I woke up, I rebooted the PC and found I had a working installation. But my rejoicing was shortlived.

Given the problems I had with DHCP earlier (see this article for details), I had opted to set up the network interface manually for this installation.

There is a small icon on the right-hand-side of the Ubuntu desktop which allows one to disable and enable networking. However, after I had entered the network details manually, I could not bring it up using this icon. Logically, this should run the ifup and ifdown scripts which will take down a network interface and bring it up again with any changes incorporated.

I checked the interfaces configuration file which resides in /etc/network. The settings looked fine; everything I had entered in the graphical utility for network configuration (which you can find under System) had been accepted. But running ifconfig showed that the network card did not have these settings.

I tried logging in and out but nothing changed. Then I tried something which no Linux user should ever have to do (unless you install a new kernel) - rebooting. Once again, there was no change.

Finally, I ran ifdown and ifup from a terminal; after that I had internet connectivity