ethernet setup for mandrake LAN
 

okay here's my problem...
first of all i'm a newbie to linux and i'm trying to convert over to the good side
i have a box with two ethernet cards. one for the internet (my school's domain) and one connected to a laptop running XPpro. i can get onto the internet fine (that's how i'm here) but i'm having trouble configuring my other eth1 card which is:
3com corporation card
i don't know to configure/initialize/set it up and i need help. i need it to share files between my box and laptop as well as to share an internet connection. so i guess that my next problem, how to share my internet on a mandrake 10 box with a laptop using XPpro. later i'll ask how to network the two in order to share files. thanks everyone/anyone for the help
mike

well... i don't know how but i got that first part fixed.... now if someone could help me out with actually setting up a LAN with my mandrake 10 box as the host and my WINxp laptop as a client (i think those are the right terms)

Have a look at the Linux Wiki networking section. To share files between WinXP and Linux you will need to configure Samba. This is not a trivial task, you will need to do some reading and learning along the way.

There are many HowTo's for Samba as well. This is the one I use the most. http://us1.samba.org/samba/docs/using_samba/toc.html

I have a router, so for me the router looks after the internet connection sharing. Do a search on internet sharing. I'm sure you will find lots of useful information.

Hope this helps.