I have two linux machines with slackware 12.1 on both of them. I have an ethernet cable, not a crosswire or crosscable or anything of that sort. Is it possible to connect both the computers using only these, i think it is as, this is possible in windows, but the transfer speeds are pathetic on windows. So, i was hoping for better speeds on linux. I also don't have a router or a hub.

I have used the command
and i have
how do i get my eth0 and eth1 interfaces on the machines 1 and 2 respectively to adapt these static ip addresses and be reachable when using ssh or ping.

Please help me out.

You need a crossover cable, you can't do it with a patch cable. It isn't an operating system issue, it is the design of the NIC hardware.

Some network cards are autosensing, but you probably don't have one of those unless the machine is very new or a Mac.

As the previous user said, this config looks like it should work if you have a modern auto-sensing NIC. If you don't there isn't a way to make it work unfortunately.

Thanks for the replies. I got it to work, looks like the NIC cards are new enough.
This is all i had to do.
But there still remains this problem of bad speed.
I need to transfer about 24GB of data and the transfer speed remains below 800KBps.
Can you help me with that? Is there something i am doing wrong? Or is this the speed i will get. I ask this because i don't understand what is it that is different now from when my computers were connected over a LAN where i got transfer speeds close to 10MBps.