Hi, I'm COMPLETELY new to Linux, in fact, I've only known it for about 3 hrs now. So, with that in mind, please help this newbie out

I'm trying to get online, I have a cable internet connection, no LAN or router or anything fancy. I'm using the Mandrake 9.2 distro, as stated above, and GNOME GUI.

My first guess when I logged into GNOME was to go into the User Control menu, and under the network and internet tab I ran the wizard. Here's what happens:

I ran the wizard, chose expert mode (because autodetect detects my winmodem only), chose cable modem, chose the default dhch-client. The wizard detects my nvidia nforce 2 MCP network adapter which came with my Soltek 75FRN2-L board, so I thought that was good... but the problem is, after it did that, and I hit next, it gave me this error : "No ethernet adapter has been detected etc" and "Drakconnect is unable to set up your connection" (something along those lines). THat makes no sense, it detected my NIC, then tells me I dont have one???

I went into the hardware section, and yes, it does have my Nvidia 2 ethernet card in its list, now wtf??

I tried running "drakconnect" in the prompt thing, I get the same error. How the heck do you fix this? Is there something wrong with the distro? Should I get RH 9 instead?

Thanks for reading my long speech btw, I was trying to be as specific and descriptive as I can, hope someone can help me, I'd like to learn a lot more about Linux, tired of windoze =(

Hi bangy,

Welcome to Linux. I hope you manage to sort out your problems.

Mandrake 9.2 is currently a beta version so you expect lots of bugs.

You could try Mandrake 9.1, Red Hat 9 or SuSE 8.2, all of which are good for newbies (as far as Linux can be) and are stable.

Iain.

Ahh, cool, thanks for replying. Which one of those Linux would you recommend me getting though? Out of the 3? Should I go for mandrake again or maybe RH?

also... what I did to try and get online with my cable, was it right or did I do something wrong?

I don't think I dare recommend a Linux distro for fear of being flamed to death

Personally, I would suggest you try SuSE 8.2. Both SuSE and Mandrake are pretty user friendly, with nice graphical management tools (Drake and Yast2). I only suggest SuSE because if you had a problem on Mandrake 9.2 there is a fair chance the problem exists on Mandrake 9.1 but not on SuSE.

Given your newbie status, its probably worth avoiding some of the less hand-holding distros such as Debian or Slackware for a while at least.

RedHat might well be fine for you; I only don't recommend it because I haven't used it enough myself on PCs to feel able to recommend it.

Now I sit back and wait for the flaming to commence

lol, I doubt anyone would flame ya. Your reasoning makes sense

I was pretty set on either Mandrake or RH, since they're the most popular ones, but ok, Suse it is. How would I go about removing the bootloader (LILO?) and Mandrake though. Should I do the FIXMBR command in XP's recovery console and then use PartitionMagic to erase the Linux partitions? Or maybe the other way around? I dont want to lose 100GB that's on my HD right now

How the heck am I suppose to dl Suse? I dont think they have installation CDs, well, I coun'dt find any at least

I took my spare NIC card and installed it in the comp, and now I got online on Linux, w00t! I dunno why it doen'st work on my onboard nic card, but hey, mission accomplished

I have a problem though. I want to configure how fast the mouse moves. and also... how come the middle scroll button on my mouse doesn't seem to work? I hate scrolling with the scrollbar on Mozilla, it's annoying! I'm using a Kensington wired optical mouse with an adapter conneted to the PS2 port, any suggestions?