Comment 39 for bug 279262

That was a bit quick, I hadn't actually rebooted.

When I rebooted, I came back to la-la land where nothing worked.
Then scanned a few manpages and came to know there is something called ifconfig which does the same/similar thing as /etc/network/interfaces so tried that one out.

sudo ifconfig eth0 inet 192.168.1.2 netmask 255.255.255.0 broadcast 61.1.96.69

This is what ifconfig eth0 gives :-

ifconfig eth0
eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr some address
          inet addr:192.168.1.2 Bcast:61.1.96.69 Mask:255.255.255.0
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
          RX packets:557 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:801 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
          RX bytes:313297 (313.2 KB) TX bytes:154915 (154.9 KB)
          Interrupt:22 Base address:some base address

But still wouldn't work, apparently the gateway information I didn't know where or how to give

Came to know also there is something called route so used that.

route add default gw 192.168.1.1 (most probably from security point of view may be a bad idea, but till I don't know any better have to use the same)

route

 route
Kernel IP routing table
Destination Gateway Genmask Flags Metric Ref Use Iface
192.168.1.0 * 255.255.255.0 U 0 0 0 eth0
default 192.168.1.1 0.0.0.0 UG 0 0 0 eth0

comments and suggestions to clean up are welcome.