To make the most of your Raspberry Pi, it needs to be connected to the Internet. You can do this in two ways: using an Ethernet cable or by Wi-Fi. Raspbian does a good job of automatically configuring its network settings for you, but sometimes you need to give it a helping hand.
Unfortunately, Raspbian doesn't include a graphical interface that lets you configure your network connections. You are able to configure your network interfaces manually using a text editor, or you can install a graphical interface to do this.
The Raspberry Pi Model B and Model B+ have an onboard Ethernet port. By default, Raspbian is configured to automatically get an IP address from a DHCP server on your network.
Sometimes, you might want to manually assign an IP address to your Raspberry Pi. This is done by editing a file called interfaces. To edit this file, you need to open up a console. The exact steps to do this are given in...