Add option to configure a network interface, but not bring it up at boot

[Tim Hull]

I recently installed Ubuntu "Hoary" on a laptop w/two network interfaces - an
intel 2200 "centrino" wireless card
and an intel e1000 ethernet device. I configured these interfaces to use DHCP,
and all seemed to be well. However,
after rebooting my system paused for an extraordinarily long time when it was
"Configuring network interfaces...".

While I think this is due to DHCP being somehow activated by default on boot, I
feel that this is not good default
behavior and should be considered a bug because 1)no clear option was given to
set up the interfaces but disable this
2)many people have network interfaces but are not always connected using them
(especially on laptops)

This could be solved by one of 2 methods:
1) Use something like ifplugd to handle network interfaces (at this point this
doesn't seem feasible in Hoary)
2) Add a clear option to set up these wireless cards and not activate them by
default on boot (this could be accompanied with some entries on the GNOME menus
to activate/deactivate network interfaces to make things
easier for users who switch networks often).

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=309151: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=309151

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

*** Bug 14088 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

[FiNeX (finex)]

...and if you try to skip the network configuration the system will be not
correctly configured: /etc/hosts and /etc/network will be setted wrong and the
loopback interface is not started at boot.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

I've forwarded this issue upstream: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=309151

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

same issue as #3991

This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 10553.