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These instructions are for Ubuntu Desktop. Servers by default do not use DHCPTraditionally most enterprise environments used static IP. This is changing somewhat due to virtualization and the concept of stateless applications. But it's not quite there yet.

Assuming your existing install is picking up DHCP correctly and your network is working fine.
First you should be running this from a console. In other words, not via ssh.If you are learning using virtual machine softare like VMWare, ensure your guest OS network is set to use Bridged Networking. This will not work with sharing the network.

If possible, it is advised to be sure you can reach your machine via a console mechanism or experiment on a test machine first.

ifconfig

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Now I don't know how to get the rest on Ubuntu quite yet (now I do), so I go to a Windows machine on the same network and type,

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sudo cp /etc/network/interfaces /etc/network/interfaces.v0.0 # Make a backup
sudo ne /etc/network/interfaces # Where ne is your preferred text editor

The file may will look like this,

The area where you file might be different is eth0 may be ens3 or something similar. This changes depending on your version of Ubuntu and setup.

We modify the file to look like this where I chose and choose 192.168.0.50. Note that this ip address would never be assigned by my router as I modified itthe router's dhcp address range from 192.168.0.2 - 192.168.0.255 to only be provide DHCP between 192.168.0.100 to - 192.168.0.255. My router itself is using the ip address 192.168.0.1.

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sudo apt-get remove isc-dhcp-client dhcp3-client dhcpcd

Notes

Some instructions mention you need network and broadcast, but they are automatically calculated from the address and netmask values. In fact adding the wrong ones can prevent things from working so I recommend leaving them out.

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