Surely someone out here in nerdville, there is someone else like me that is running linux. I got REALLY fed up with microsloth's BS and decided to say screw it. I konw how to run a lot of linux but i have never set up a system before.
The big problem i have is that i can't seem to get onto the internet. I'm not sure if the net card is not initalizing, or if i have to do something special to get on the network because it is linux, or if it is something else entirely.

any help would be greatly appreciated.
thanks

hey microsoft aint so bad

use "ifconfig -a" to show all network devices, and use plain "ifconfig" to see which interfaces are currently up. either the nic just doesnt have the right driver installed (doesnt show up at all under ifconfig -a) or the interface just isnt started (shows up under ifconfig -a but not ifconfig) or the interface is up but not configured correctly. tell us which.

Some basic information regarding your system would be helpful in diagnosing your problems.

What distribution of Linux? What installation options or preferences?
Are you more familiar with using a shell ("command prompt") or a GUI configuration program?
What make and model of ethernet card?

Like Mee said, there's a few different levels of something "not working," and simply stating that "it doesn't work" isn't very helpful.

Sorry... I didn't think to include system info.
and I can't just spout it off since it's my second POS computer up here for file sharing and such.

I am trying to get Mandrake 10 to work at the moment.. If anyone else has a suggestion of a better make let me know. (i konw i just asked for a giant debate PLEASE just keep the comments to suggestions and the bonuses from each rather than a 20 page paper on why all the others suck)

and yes microsoft does suck that much ... i had to call them four times this summer because i had changed my registry to the way I wanted it, but since the registry had some big changes, it required a call to microsoft, and then the situation got more stupid from there.

I like mandrake 9.2. 10, in my personal opinion, is not pollished.
10.0.2 is out. You might look into that.
I don't know if it comes with KDE 3.3... but I'd get that too.

Mandrake is pretty friendly to your devices though.
If your ethernet card is supported... it will work. Make sure you registered your MAC address... I think you can register up to 5.

brandito

I've got Debian on my current machine. It rocks and sucks at the same time. Nice because it is VERY stable, immune to viruses (unless there is a Linux virus i am unaware of) and completley free. But it sucks because i have really no clue how to install and configure programs, hard to find software, and i don't even want to think about adding a printer. When i get my new computer built i'm going back to WinXP, but keeping the old one as backup.

did you really wanna fix your problem, or did you just wanna talk about linux?

and last i checked, you could register 3 nics. the quota is 6, but each nic takes 2 (one machine, one nic). it seems like you should be able to register 2 nics on one machine, but i never figured out how. and its too late now.

Dont quite want to switch over yet... but the time will come

for the time being I'm running a LiteStep shell so windows XP is less like all that is wrong with the world.

luke, debian has apt, probably the best package management I've seen. Go to packages.debian.org and find the name of the package you want to install, then do an apt-get install at the console. Hell, you can build your entire install that way, or at least that's how I do it. Do a minimal install with just networking and apt, then apt-get install gimp or something and let it grab all of the dependencies for you. You get a tiny little install that way.

Yeah, i have installed quite a few things using the kpackage utility. However it is alot harder than windows. My last year's roomate set me up with it when ME crased on my computer. I really don't know what i'm doing without his help. I'm planning on keeping this computer around for backup though...

take the next step, gentoo. oh, and i hear BSD's ports system is pretty good too, i think thats what gentoo's portage was based on (conceptually, not code)

Gentoo is for Ricers. Not to offend anyone, I just thought it was pretty funny.

if you used gentoo, most of that page wouldnt be funny at all. in fact, most of it would make pretty good sense. (most)

Sorry to have not writen back... yes i did want to fix the problem and now it is finished. thanks to you all that helped