I think I’ve solved my connection problem. In the last post I outlined how I needed to fire up Terminal and type in sudo dhclient. Well I finally got some mental space to think about it, and this was the solution in my case
Administration/Networking [password]
Under Network Settings choose Connections/
Wired Connections (in my case) /Properties
and choose Automatic Configuration.
You may need different settings if you have a wireless
connection, for instance, but this worked for me, as I haven’t
had time to get my head around setting up my wireless connection.
Needless to say I’m sorely tempted to try Christer Edwards tutorial on
setting up Open DNS - but I know I’d muck it up just as I’ve got this going!
Still, I’ll try it when I install the next verssion of Ubuntu, probably in
May.

If you’d like to drop me a line with the connection trouble you have I’d be happy to shoot back with some suggestions. Right now I’m fighting to get wireless working on my new machine and I understand there is nothing more frustrating than not being able to connect when you need!
With Ubuntu 6.1 and a DSSL ethernet connection Evolution works fine, the package and update manager work fine, but Firefox hangs. I’ve tried various settings (ssl tsl, etc) but nothing seems to work. Any suggestions?