Network Cord
 

At work our entire room was moved (temporarily) and the room we moved from had a crap load of network wires laying everywhere. Me having all this trouble with kubuntu (dependancy hell) and windows drivers looks at this as an opportunity to obtain [ ;) ] a wire for myself. Well I got it! So I cam home with my new (long) wire and hooked it all up through my router... Well thats all i could do.. I attempted all system properties and configurations i could... I could browse the web? Any insight?

I'm thinking you've picked up a crossover cable, which is a no-no for most router to computer connections. You need a 'straight through'. It's easy enough to make a straight through out of a crossover, though. You just need to have some RJ45's handy.

Although I can't say that you dont have other problems now you've been messin' with configuration options and such.

No i haven't altered anything really at all in the properties... mainly browsing

crossover cable... well i don't have any RJ45's handy... grr one thing leads to the next

Technically, a crossover is correct for a computer-to-router connection. Its the switches that mess things up. Although a lot of household devices will auto-detect a crossover (Macs do that too, it seems).

If it's a crossover cable, it's probably yellow. That should save some assumptions.

And if I were you, I'd skip the fancy gui tools and try to get your card working from a term...
ping, dmesg, and ifconfig are your friends.

Is that a convention? I've heard of something like that for fiber. I had a yellow Cat-5 somewhere that was a patch, but maybe it was a homemade (got it from my neighbor a few years back). I don't know where it is anymore. Almost all of my cables are gray though. Gotta love those homemade ones...

quick way to check if it's a crossover or not: if the wires are arranged in the same order on both sides, it's not a crossover. If the first (or last, depending on which way you look) pair on one side is split on the other side (wires 3 and 6), it's a crossover. And if they're completely opposite, it's a rollover cable... in which case, toss it out :p

The quickest way to tell what type of cable you have, is to hold each connecter side by side (and at the same orientation) and look at the colour of the internal wires. If they are the same, you have a straight through, if a couple of them are swapped, you have a crossover (well, assuming the cable is made correctly). The other alternative is that it's a rollover, which means one side's colours go in the opposite direction.

Actually I am using a cross over cable for networking. I simply have two NIC installed in my main computer. One network card is for my internet connection and the other goes directly to my other computer. I can transfer files and browse the internet on both of them without a router. The main machine is running XP Pro and the other one has XP Pro and Ubuntu

>Actually I am using a cross over cable for networking.
>One network card is for my internet connection and the other goes directly to my other computer.

And that's exactly how it's meant to be set up. Quite a few switches and routers will autodetect the cable type, but these are the general rules:

DTE == Router, PC
DCE == Switch, Hub

DTE to DCE == Straight-through
DCE to DCE == Crossover
DTE to DTE == Crossover

Technically, a variety of cables are correct. In reality, however, the fact is that most router to computer connections require a straight through cable. This is because the router does the "crossing" internally.