okay, I'm connectng through a LAN, at home I'm using a Linksys router that you can plug into or use wirelessly. It receives internet from a DSL modem. I'm pretty sure I have a dynamic IP address from my ISP. At school I'm merely plugged into the dorm's LAN.

So pppsetup I learned is for dial-up, I really have no use for that but at least I learned that command.

I ran lspci, I figured the important part of the output would be

02:01.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4401 100 Base-T (rev 01)
02:02.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4301 802.11b (rev 02)

I think this means that Slack did recognize my LAN and wireless NIC, right?
So how do I tell Slack to let me connect???

After running lsmod I got a lot of output and have no idea what I'm looking for. Thanks for any help that you can give me.

no, that doesn't mean that Slack has loaded any modules for you network card. That just means it is connected to your comp. You can see similar info by running cat /proc/pci. Run ifconfig -a. You should see eth0, your network card. If not, make sure you have proper driver. Are you using the kernel that came with Slack? I know 2.4.22+ atleast comes with the Broadcom 4400 driver. It is marked as "experimental" in 2.4.22 (the one that comes with Slack), so it may not have included it by default. Try recompiling your kernel with it enabled. Also try running netconfig , it is very straightforward.

You can try lsmod | grep b44 too, that is the name of the driver for the Broadcom 4400.