It get's even cooler when I tell you that it automatically saves that access point and automatically connects without me having to ask it to.
Irrelevant.
Since I can't install it, I am running it from a live CD. But it should still work once, right?
Yes.
I tried, it and my wireless light started blinking, and is now on. The terminal said "DHCPDISCOVER on wlan0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval [somenumber]" 6 times. And then:
"No DHCPOFFERS received.
No working leases in persistent database - sleeping."
Any idea what happened?
Linux asked for a DHCP lease -- that is, it requested an IP address -- and no DHCP server responded. Your network
does use DHCP, right?
Either way, you can try a static IP address configuration. Open up
/etc/network/interfaces as root (you can use
nano, which is a pretty basic editor but easy to use) and change the line
iface wlan0 inet dhcp to read
iface wlan0 inet static. Then, just below it, add these lines:
address 192.168.0.2
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 192.168.0.1You may need to change those values to match your own network. The
netmask and
gateway should be the same as on whatever OS you're using now, but the
address needs to be unique. It also needs to be within the range of IP addresses that are valid in your network, but changing the last number is safe if the last number in the netmask is 0.
Since your interface has already been brought up, you'll need to run (as root)
ifdown before running
ifup again.