So i have looked up a lot of forums for these solution but haven't really found one that works. I have a laptop running ubuntu 11.10 connected to the ethernet cord at home and i want to share the internet over wifi with my friend's laptop running windows7.

I did not think it would be so difficult, I tried a lot of things:

1. I went to networks and then wireless and set up a wifi hotspot, my laptop got connected to it and the ipv4 was set to "shared to other computers". Thankfully the network was discoverable and after some tries my friend was able to connect to the network, but it still showed that there was no internet access. I tried coniguring the tcp addresses of the wifi on his laptop. Bottom line: did not work.

2. I went to the network manager, clicked on create a new wireless network, created one with security WEP 40/128 bit passphrase, tried the other 2 options later, and did the same thing as with the wifi, this network was also not discoverable initially and after some tries, we could connect to it but then ICS was not working although there was a working internet on my ubuntu laptop.

I would really appreciate if some one who has faced a similar problem and got it fixed to please give me a step by step solution of how to get this work, because this is a prety common problem with ubuntu distros I have noticed.

Note: This however seems to work with ubuntu to ubuntu connections, but specifically cross OS connections like windows or my phone running android ICS are not able to see or if connect not able to share internet on my laptop