Many people struggle to set up their internet on Linux in general (especially if you only have the command line to help you, no GUI’s here folks). There are a few commands you will need to get your head around and I would suggest at least a working knowledge of networks and network topology, it is completely beyond the scope of this article to explain networking and networks. For this example we will use a very simple network, the commands you will need are the following:

ifconfig
iwconfig
dhclient

Lets assume that your running in a DHCP network to make our lives even easier (this also applys if your running Linux in something like VMWare), so, tap in:

ifconfig

‘ifconfig’ is the Interface configuration program, it will list all available interfaces on your hardware, in my case it shows lo (local loopback) & eth0 (ethernet), we are of course after eth0. So we now issue:

dhclient eth0

We are telling linux to attempt to automagically attach itself to the network and search for a DHCP server and assign itself an IP address – if this command will not run (has an error), chances are that you are not logged in as a root user, so issue:

sudo dhclient eth0

And enter your credentials when prompted, assuming you are in a small simple network, boot your browser of choice and away you go. Next up connecting Wirelesly ;)