Member Avatar for nosralr

Hi there,

I have been an avid user of Windows XP since day 1. I have had no issues with it, surprise surprise, so continue to plug along. However, I have always been interested in testing out Linux as I hear so many positive things about it. I am currently posted in a 3rd world country where 99.9% of the people use pirated Windows XP as their operating system. I am volunteering in an NGO and witness someone people on a weekly, bi-weekly and monthly basis reinstalling WXP because they run an outdated operating system so prone to security threats.

So! About 1 month ago I happened to use a machine that had Linux Mint installed on it. I was impressed to say the least. I could see how in just a matter of hours the local people here could make the switch from WXP to Linux Mint if they had the chance. Any other Linux distribution would be way beyond them, as I even struggle with other distributions after working with computers for 22 years and English being my mother tongue. The folks here have neither of those advantages. This has caused me to take a keen interest in Linux Mint and how it would work for this non-profit NGO with whom I have current affiliation.

So what I did was install Linux Mint on a machine along side of WXP; now it has a double boot option. However, the internet connection works on WXP but not on Linux Mint. The reason is that the connection is locked to one MAC address. I checked the MAC address in WXP and it is different than the MAC address I get when I start up LinuxMint. I thus went online and discovered how to change the MAC address in LM.

#ifconfig eth0 hw ether ??:??:??:??:??:??

However, I still could not get online. When I checked the MAC address on the network card it was still showing the old one. Since I am brand new here, and don’t know anything about Linux at all would someone mind assisting me in kindergarten simple instructions as to how I may do this.

If I can get this going and learn a little bit about LM then I could possibly convert a few hundred “pirated Windows people.”

Thank you kindly for your time and patience.

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by sknake
Member Avatar for sknake

Your MAC address is associated with your physical network card and not the operating system so you should have an identical MAC Address for both windows and Linux. Do you have two NICs? Is this a wired connection or wireless?

Member Avatar for nosralr

I will have to check if there are two NIC's. It is someone else's desktop so didn't look so closely. I will now that you mention it.

It is a wired connection.

Member Avatar for sknake

OK, that sounds good. It is possible you may have missed an eth1 in the 'ifconfig -a' or the linux install may not have had drivers for both cards thus you only saw one NIC which wasn't the one you were expecting.

Let me know and we'll go from there.

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