I have Fedora Core 1 installed and it works fine. I was able to connect to the Internet before.

I just had my laptop turned on and booted into Gnome. I did not plug the network cable in until it was already booted into Gnome. So I plugged the cable in and then tried to open Mozilla and go somewhere and I could not. Then I opened a shell and tried to ping and could not.

My question is, how come this was not detected automatically? Should I have to reboot to get this to work? What do I need to do?

Any help would be appreciated.

Welcome to LQ.

You don't need to reboot. What has happened is that when it booted, it detected that there was no network connection (since the cable was unplugged) and so didn't start the network connections. To solve this, you need to start the network services. Open a terminal, change to the user root and run /etc/rc.d/init.d/network restart.

There is a programme you can install, if you wish, that will detect if the cable is plugged in after it has booted and do this for you. It is called netplugd.

Wow, that was quick!
Thank you for the response!