I have just built (well, re-installed the OS on) a new system and have connected it to my LAN. It's running xubuntu 8.10 and uses the TV as its display device (probably irrelevant).
It all installed fairly smoothly and appeared to work OK except that the networking was a bit 'jerky'.
I then found that I couldn't ssh from the new machine to my desktop machine whereas other machines on the LAN could connect OK. It turned out that this was because the machine had the *same* IP address as my desktop machine. This of course explains the 'jerky' networking too!
However I really can't understand *why* it has decided its IP address is 192.168.1.4.
OK, some details, the router IP is 192.168.1.1 and it's the router that provides DHCP to the network. Most machines have static addresses, in particular my desktop machine (as noted above) is 192.168.1.4. The router is set up to start handing out DHCP addresses starting at 192.168.1.64 and this does work as there is a device (a VOIP server) which gets the address 192.168.1.64.
The 'new' xubuntu system has default network setup, I have given it the name 'lounge' (which is different from all others) and it acquires its IP address and networking setup automatically on startup.
So *how* is it getting 192.168.1.4 as its IP address?
OK, I can fix the problem fairly easily by giving it a fixed IP but I'd love to know what's gone wrong.