I recently took up the challenge of trying to install Linux on my old Thinkpad 755c (486 DX2, 20mb RAM, 540 mb HD, No CD ROM, Only Floppy Drive Support). Tried installing Debian but had all sorts of problems so I am now giving Tiny Linux ago which is based on Slackware 4.0, and I seem to be doing better with it.

Where I am at is that I have managed to get configure ifconfig so that I can ping other machines on my home network which seems to work fine, but for some reason I still can't ping externally and cannot get connectivity to the outside world. I figure it is not a hardware issue but a setting I have missed somewhere. I have install all of the A and N packages, but really need connectivity to install the rest of the packages due to not having a cd rom drive.

I am using a 16 bit PCMCIA ethernet card and have allocated a static ip address on the network to the MAC address of the card so I know that works.

I don't have DHCP support on the laptop yet.

Any help here would be greatly appreciated. Need a bit of a checklist of options to see if I missed something.

Hi metroside, Welcome to lq. Since you set this up statically have you checked your default gateway? What does the output from the following produce?Good luck. ;-)

/sbin/ifconfig -a displays this

eth0 link encap: Etthernet HWaddr 00:00:E8:37:1F:F8
inet addr:10.1.1.7 Bcast:10.1.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:23 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:21 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:100
Interrupt:3 Base address:0x300

lo link encap: Local Loopback
inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MTU:3924 Metric:1
RX packets:18 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:18 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:100

/sbin/route -n

kernel IP routing table
Destination Gateway Genmask Flags Metric Ref Use Iface
10.1.1.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.0 U 0 0 0 eth0
127.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 255.0.0.0 U 0 0 0 lo
0.0.0.0 10.1.1.1 0.0.0.0 UG 1 0 0 eth0

Hope this helps

Fixed the problem myself. Thanks for your help PeaceDog

When you ping "outside" are you using the IP? What does the following produce?What does the rest of the network look like? Could this be a firewall issue?
Good luck. ;-)

You're welcome, Glad it's sorted. It might be helpful for others if you'll post your solution.
Good luck. ;-)

I had to add my gateway details to the route table using the command

user#:route add default gw 10.1.1.1 eth0

make sure your have eth0 connection set to up by using the command

user#:ifconfig eth0 up

If not you will get a error saying the network is unreachable.

This allowed me to connect externally
Thanks again PeaceMan.

You're welcome, Glad you sorted it. Setting things statically can be tricky depending on the network. Thanks for posting the solution.
Good luck. ;-)