I have no clue what happened, but my plug became loose from my laptop without me knowing and eventually my battery died. Linux crashed because of it, and when I reinserted the plug and restarted my computer, I waited for Linux to check itself and went back to work. However, when I tried to connect to the internet, it said my proxy server wasn't working. I restarted my proxy on my other computer, but still got the same message. Then I rebooted both computers again and still got the same message. So I disconnected my internet and set up my Linux to connect directly to isolate the problem. But the PPP connection would activate and then in seconds become Inactive automatically. I formatted and started from scratch. But I still can't get my ethernet card to work. Before it was the easiest thing to set up >_< Is my card dead because of the crash? Is that possible. I'm sure you can tell, I'm a newbie. I've only been using Linux for about 4 months, and while I prefer it to Windows for programming, I don't know hardware at all, and it's really beginning to piss me off when it does crap like this.

My ethernet card is Laneed thernet PC Card
My OS is RH 8.0

My ethernet was working fine until the computer crash, so I'm assuming that is what caused this.

How do you test the connectivity between the hosts? Use the 'ping' command directly instead of going through proxies via some program if you haven't done that already. Is the interface up ('ifconfig eth0')? Is the ethernet cable ok? Is the driver module loaded and pcmcia support activated? Is the filesystem ok or did the crash corrupt some critical files? What has PPP to do with your ethernet connection? BTW: Don't format a Linux installation unless you really have to. It's not Windows and you almost never have to do that with Linux. It also makes you loose valuable log files that could tell you what the problem was.

Thank you very much for your reply!

I typed 'ping' to my other computer's IP and got destination host unreachable. on top of that my ping is looping forever (I've never used it before, so it might just be a setup issue) Is it okay for me to post my ifconfig information here? I can't understand it. I'm assuming that the crash corrupted critical files which is why I reformatted. Sorry, I'm new at this. I didn't know that I shouldn't reformat. Sorry, the PPP is not really PPP but PPPOE for my DSL service. It's the xDSL option in the Internet Configuration Wizard.

Again, thank you very much for replying. I've never used a Linux forum before for fear of being laughed at or worse ignored >_<;; Your reply was really appreciated.