Permanently enabling the network on the ppc imac

Always willing to experiment on myself, I decided that I'll try running the ubuntu ppc imac as a second machine. After all I've a decent browser on it, albeit Firefox 1.5, a text editor and abiword as a lightweight wordprocessor. Basically all that's needed for a second machine.

But then a little snag. I hadn't expected the machine to end up as a production machine so I'd built it offline. So the question is, how to make it an online machine. The network preferences tool would seem to be the answer but while it lets you configure the network interface, it only lets you turn it on for the session.

So here's my fix.

Setup the interface in network preferences.

Check you have working network

Setup network time synchronisation in time&date. It will ask you for the cd to install ntp.

then you need to edit the following file - I'm happy using vi, but nano or pico are just as good. 

use the command

sudo vi /etc/network/interface

and immediately before the line

iface eth0 inet dhcp

insert the line

auto eth0

exit and save the file.

As the network is already running all you need to do is reboot to verify it's working. If for any reason you're editing this on an offline machine the command sudo ifup -a will start all network interfaces for you.

After this all you need do is download all the software updates. In my case there were a 197 of them and it took over an hour. Time to play with the cat ...