Can only reach Ubuntu website

First of all, are you sure you can go to ubuntu.com at all, not the default startpage stored on your computer?

If yes, but you can't access other websites, maybe it is DNS problem?

Try some websites by IP:
http://64.233.187.99/ (google)
http://212.58.240.120/ (bbc)

If you can access them by IP address, then you are experiencing DNS problems. Maybe you need to configure a valid DNS server manually.

Thank you for your response, Vytas.

I can get to Google by IP, but BBC by IP will not load up (although it knows that it is trying to go to BBC (it says so in the status bar). Sometimes I can get to Google by typing Google.com in the browser, sometimes not. I am able to ping both of them either way, and I get good response times; it seems to be other applications that are having the problem.

I can almost always get to the Mozilla website and to the Ubuntu website by typing their DNS names in the address bar.

I have also been hit and miss on installing applications using the add/remove programs installer. I finally got Mozilla to install, but it took me many tries and many time-outs. Alas, Mozilla has the same luck as Firefox (but since Firefox is just one of Mozilla's components, that should not surprise me).

I am typing this from my MS Windows laptop, which is sitting right next to the Ubuntu Linux machine. I have had no Internet problems today on the laptop.

So you still think I am having DNS problems, or is something else going on?

Regards,

Bryant

Is it a PPPoE connection? If so, type pppoeconf in the terminal and set it up like that.

I did look for that as well in hopes that I could go that route. The modem, while capable of using PPPoE, is not using that configuration.

Bryant

No, DNS seems to be working, to be sincere I really don't know what is wrong.

You can try pinging websites by name, for example (from terminal)
ping www.google.com
ping www.gnome.org
ping www.laptop.org
By output, you can see if ping resolves IP correctly, etc
Btw, you may also use graphical utility, System > Administration > Network tools

If you suspect something is wrong with browsers, you may try simpler HTTP programs, for example wget (from terminal) on the same websites that aren't working for you, for example
wget www.gnome.org
It will show you information, and fetch index.html if successful.

But you have said application installer works unreliably too (it uses wget to fetch packages), so problem is most probably unrelated to browsers as such.

Is your Windows laptop connected in a same way your Linux machine is? Does it use the same settings (DHCP?)?

Maybe, there are some problems with your network card, or its linux drivers?
Check (from terminal)
ifcfg eth0
It should display basic statistics such as errors (I get 0 errors, 0 collisions)

That said, your situation is just weird, I have no clue what is wrong :( Maybe others can help

ifconfig eth0, not ifcfg, was a typo sorry

ifconfig eth0 is coming up with

RX packets: 16409 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:1 frame:0
TX packets: 12982 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
Collisions: 0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:18175189 (17.3 MiB) TX bytes:1188790

I did go into the networking tool and manually add aliases for a couple of sites. After adding the aliases, those sites came up right away, but this is not terribly practical because I like to click on links on pages my browser brings up, and those links will only load sporadically. It's not that the links never come up; it is just that they resolve very, very slowly, and the browser is more apt than not to time out. Your initial hunch may have been correct; I may be having DNS problems.

Ubuntu 6.0.6 did not have this problem on this computer; maybe I will just revert to that one for the time-being... I'll give it another day or two and see what others have to say.

Thanks for your help Vytas.

Bryant