The BigLig Thinks

Well, that went very simply indeed. It asked a couple of questions, to which it more or less already knew the answers, chugged away, spat out the CD, rebooted and there I was.

First thing it does is pop up the "software updates" application, pointing out that there are updates to some of my packages... to a lot of my packages actually. Good job I'm in work, and so have an 8 meg feed.

I'm a big fan of apt-get, and would normally use that, but I figure I might as well let software updates update what got put on during the install, as I'd like to give the default packages a try before installing the same stuff I've used before. Meanwhile I'll copy a handful of music files over as I want to test the audio player; one thing I want this box to be able to do is host my music.

Which brings us to the first problem of the day, hurrah!

It can't ping my desktop machine by name - DNS is not resolving it.

System, Administration, Networking gives the answer; the system has detected both my wireless network, and my wired network. The wireless is one we keep for visitors, and just gives internet access; all well and good but the machine is using the DNS server it got from the wireless DHCP, so it can't resolve it. Interesting that, since wired is eth0 I would have thought it would have been the favoured connection.

Now, how to fix this... I can manually add my internal network's DNS, but of course that is stupid. I can turn the wireless off, but that shouldn't be necessary. I have an option for which card's default gateway to use, which is irrelevant, but I'll change it anyhow in case it does make a difference. I still have a few minutes to wait before proceeding, as it's still downloading packages, so just to get those MP3s over, I just point smbclient at the IP address of my desktop. If you're not familiar with SMBclient, it's works like an FTP client, but connects to Windows servers. Useful for quick and dirty jobs like this one.