Sorry, but been frustrated for a while with this issue:

I have a RTL8195 based network card inside my PC, and my first installation was Slackware. Installed great, but my network wouldn't start up. (at boot, it would explain that eth0 failed) so after a while of using slackware, i reinstalled.

I installed Fedora Core 2! ... got it working. It was happy. But when it booted up to the network eth0, it gave me a big red [ FAILED ] ... after it loaded, i went into a terminal and ifconfig.
...
the settings were there :| so I ifdown eth0 then ifup eth0. and whoaly macro! it worked!

got bored of Fedora Core 2 (it's nice and all, but I want to test them all out :P), so installed MandrakeLinux 10.

same issue popped up. when the PC initialized, it failed on eth0 - yet when I ifdown and ifup it, it'll work.

well that was the case..

now ifdown and ifup doesn't work at all! friggen A :|

so I was jsut wondering if anyone here had this issue or if this issue was posted and I just didn't refine my search :|

would "hotplug" cause an issue?

Closed! I just replaced my Linksys LNE100TX card with a RealTek :| It works now :P