A selection of newbie questions

[daveedin]

Hi, I'm new to Mint, having migrated from Mandriva. Rather a lot of differences...

I have 2 desktop machines, and both are having some problems. There are 3 issues between the two.

The first is on the desktop connected directly to the router (via a CAT5e cable if that makes any difference). On that machine the network speed is so slow it's unreal. I've seen it take over 20 minutes to return the Google search page, if it returns it at all. The network itself seems to be ok - my phone and laptop connect wirelessly to the router and don't have any issue with network speeds. Any ideas how I can troubleshoot that?

The second issue is also network related - the second desktop can see the wireless network, but for some reason absolutely refuses to connect to it. Wireless is enabled, and it can see the network in the list - but it just will not connect to it, for reasons I cannot understand. The other day I got round it by deleting the network and recreating it. This worked briefly but even that isn't helping now... Networking really isn't my forte.

The final issue is perhaps the simplest one. When I created my user, it was configured as an administrator, and I gave it a password. However something somewhere has changed, and when I boot up, my user is listed but with a "Login" button instead of a password field. Configured as though the user has no password. However on clicking the button it won't log the user in. I tried it in a Terminal and it required the password. I thought something had gotten lost somewhere so I reset the password on the command line with passwd, but still on booting the same happens - no password field. The root password (as assigned to my user) is still in there somewhere and required for sudo/terminal commands etc - It's as though the system knows my user needs a password but hasn't told the login screen to request it.

I'm more than a little confused with these issues - any and all advice/troubleshooting help will be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance
Dave

[xenopeek]

1. Open a terminal on the CAT5e connected machine, and run the following two commands. The first just pings google.com, the second the Google public DNS directly by IP address. Both with a timeout of 30 seconds. It should respond in milliseconds, so go ahead and give it a test and share output here.

Code: Select all

ping -c 1 -W 30 google.com
ping -c 1 -W 30 8.8.8.8

If both encounter a timeout, install traceroute and run that. Share the output of the second command.

Code: Select all

sudo apt-get install traceroute
traceroute 8.8.8.8

2. On the Wifi troubled machine, please share the output of:

Code: Select all

inxi -SNxc 0

3. Which version/edition of Linux Mint are you using?