I did something stupid... help! [solved]

Hardware
, ,
1

I’ve spent my Sunday afternoon installing Q4os (Debian with KDE Plasma for most intents and purposes I think) on my old laptop, replacing the increasingly sluggish Win10.

All went well, until casting around for a way to hook my wifi printer I installed rdnssd (using apt) thinking I needed it to run ‘something’ to find my printer.

I didn’t realize it would remove network-manager… so I removed it again. But now I have no network connectivity at all. So I can’t install anything! :rofl:
I’m in a kind of catch-22 situation, all through my own careless attitude.
I could reinstall the OS, but seems a waste if there’s a more reasonable approach to fix it.

Any suggestions anyone?

1 Like
2

OK…

$ ip a show | awk  '/^[0-9]: /{print $2}'

got me the name of the usb ethernet adaptor, then sudo dhclient eth0 with the eth0 replaced with my adaptor got internet working.
I still haven’t got network manager running properly yet, but I’m sure I’ll work it out…

1 Like
3

Yep. Sudo apt-get install plasma-nm was the missing bit.

1 Like
4

You can also configure your interface by editing /etc/network/interfaces

When I installed debian on my server it came without network manager and I got network by configuring it. Since I needed a static IP it worked out well and it’s what I use to this day.

After configuration you need to bring the interface up with ifup 

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

auto eno1
iface eno1 inet static
address 192.168.1.91
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 192.168.1.1
1 Like
5

Thanks! I saw some advice online on a forum somewhere on that approach. I found it a little hard to get my head around, but was going to try it.
Then came across the dhclient thing, tried it hopefully and it worked. :slight_smile:

I still need to get the printer (an Epson on wifi - uses a proprietary app on Windows) sorted, but I’ll read up more carefully this time instead of my previous “click first, ask questions later” approach :expressionless:.

1 Like
6

Many years ago at work we used Network Manager for dynamic environments (like a laptop) that need to leave and join networks in a regular basis. But we used @hatsnp’s method for static installations such as servers (all the /etc/sysconfig/network scripts, if memory serves).

Then again that was on RHEL, was many years ago and I’ve probably forgotten half of it. I once “cloned” a server OS by letting a newly installed drive hardware-mirror to another then modifying the mirror for a second server. It worked but took a slight lobotomy to the network config before it was done.

1 Like