New installation of FC5 went fine (nVidia nForce2), except for no internet. Same system ran FC3 one year ago without this problem, and runs SUSE 9.3 now.

dmesg | grep eth and /sbin/ifconfig -a show the ethernet card is detected and packets are being received, but at boot - determining IP info - it times out.

Those two commands are all I know to check. This is the only computer on my home network.

Can someone point me in the right direction, or is this too difficult for a relative newbie like me to solve?

You might want to assign a static IP address to the ethernet card.

Thanks for the response, xode.

I suppose I could do that, but because it is DHCP, I would need to do it every time I use the computer, or leave it connected continuously. Now, when I'm not using the computer, I disconnect the cable for security reasons and frequently get a new IP when I reconnect.

I guess I can't use FC.

Slackware and SUSE have no problem with my system, but I had hoped to replace SUSE with FC. I've not yet been able to configure Slackware into a usable OS on my system, but I've bought a subscription and it's just a matter of time and effort.

??? And just how do you connect to the internet? Specifically, what other pieces of hardware do you have that are involved in your internet connection other than your computer?

I have a DSL unit ("modem") which is between the computer and phone connection.

It's an always-on connection, but since I'm not running a server there's no reason to leave it connected when I'm not using it. It's a trick I learned when I was on Windows, and I see no reason to stop it in Linux.

Although I would like to use FC, like I said before, Slackware-based distros and SUSE work fine with this system and I will stay with only them if need be.

I've had this same problem with all Debian-based distros, too - so it's not just FC.

How many eth cards have you got??? I've had problems with eth0 and eth1 shifting positions.
I have had the occasional problem with DHCP timing out during boot, (I've now set it to not activate at boot) but it's just a matter of manually activating afterwards. Can you do that??

that's also what I've gone through, decrepit.
the box tried to activate DHCP on eth0, but the interface I wanted to
use was eth1. I used a workaround a la ifdown eth0; ifup eth1 or something
like that and it worked.
Then I configured /etc/network/interfaces correctly and that
solved my trouble for good.

AtomicAmish could add this to /etc/rc.d/rc.local

Thank you all for your replies. I can get back to this at the end of the week, and will let you know how this works out.