Having a network bridge allows you to bridge traffic under multiple devices so they can talk natively without using any special routing, iptables/firewall or other trickery.
To create your bridge you need the bridge-utils package for brctl and if you want to do things like bridge VMs that run on a tap device you will need the uml-utilities which provides "tunctl".
1.) Install the utilities to make our bridge
sudo apt-get i........
I dread updating the kernel and rebooting to find the Ubuntu graphics aren't working and you have to manually intervene. This is usually because Ubuntu for whatever reason didn't update the drivers you need (eg. the manually compiled Nvidia Kernel driver that MUST be recompiled for each and every kernel update unfortunately).
The most common reason may be that "linux-source" hasn't been installed automatically on my system. I tried to manually reinstall the........