I recently installed Ubuntu on my laptop, and now I can't connect to the Internet. How can I fix this?

uninstall the program and reinstall it with the os system

I’m sorry, you’ll have to elaborate. Reinstall which program?

I had this issue after installing Linux on a couple of PC laptops, but I’m surprised to hear of it on a Mac (since they are Unix based). My problem was caused by Linux not recognizing my wireless adapters. I solved the problem on one machine by finding a version of Unix that did work with my adapter – the other would only connect with ethernet when I was in Linux. I don’t know if you have the same issue, but I’ll be following the question with interest.

Good luck!

@glacial

I solved the problem on one machine by finding a version of Unix that did work with my adapter

Is Unix a typo, or is that machine now running on Unix?

One reason I’m asking is that I used to work on machines that I think ran on Unix, when I worked for AT&T.

@Brian1946 It wasn’t a typo, though thinking about it further, I think I ended up going with a version of Scientific Linux (I tried several versions of both). Unix and Linux are more or less the same thing anyway.

What sort of wireless adapter do you have? As I recall, teh G4 was an odd duck in that regard.

Long story short, I doubt you have the right driver installed.

Oh, and OS X is based on BSD Unix. Needless to say, that presents interesting licensing issues ;)

what is the output of ifconfig in the Terminal?

@johnpowell A lot of things.
Link encap: Local Loopback
inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.00
inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric: 1
RX packets:12 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:12 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:720 (720.0 B) TX bytes:720 (720.0 B)

Reinstall Ubuntu

It isn’t seeing any network interfaces besides localhost. And it is a PowerPC CPU so I doubt many people are out there trying to get it to work.

I have installed Linux on older PowerPC Macs and I am not sure what you want to gain from it besides learning about Linux. It is buggy and slower than OS X. And I say that as a person that has more computers running Ubuntu than OS X.

@johnpowell Funny; I’ve seen more OS X crashes and bogs than Ubuntu issues of that nature. I won’t even get into the studies I’ve seen. However, I agree that running it (or anything) on a computer that old and deprecated is dubious.

@johnpowell It’s funny that you said that, actually. I really only did it out of boredom. It was too old and slow to be of much use to me, so installing ubuntu was a little experiment.

Sadly, the UI has bloated to the point where Ubuntu has trouble with older machines unless you try a lighter version like Xubuntu (the xcfe UI is less of a system hog than GNOME or Unity).