It has been 8 days since I purchased this program and I still cannot get to the net. Asking questions at RedHat support is tough. I am trying to connect via DSL. Linux recognizes my ethernet card. Everything seems to be installed. The Gnome connection icon indicates that I am connected but each time I attempt to connect I get an error message telling me that the host is unknown. Help!

Make sure you have your DNS hosts listed in /etc/resolv.conf
Put "nameserver" and the IP address on separate line for each DNS host you have.

I typed in /etc/resolv.conf as you directed but only received that familiar error message...no such file or directory. I looked in the directory of /etc but did not see anything. Did I go about this incorrectly?

You need to edit the /etc/resolv.conf file, so just typing that won't help. You will probably have to be root or 'su' to edit the file though. Use an editor like vi, vim, jed, or joe. Like this:

vim /etc/resolv.conf

Make sure you are root OR that you su (superuser) before editing the file.

Don't forget to perform a few simple checks to make sure your connection is functioning at all before you worry too much about hostname resolution (although you definitely need to edit /etc/resolv.conf at some point).

First, ping or traceroute a machine you know the IP address of. If you don't know any, try 203.24.205.1 (something which I know is almost always online).

Try this:

# traceroute -n 203.24.205.1
traceroute to 203.24.205.1 (203.24.205.1), 30 hops max, 38 byte packets
1 210.50.227.100 2.368 ms 2.014 ms 2.221 ms
2 203.134.26.22 27.309 ms 27.200 ms 27.133 ms
...and so on

What you see will be very different in terms of the actual IP addresses shown, but as long as you see something similar, you at least know your DSL connection is up and active.

THEN you can worry about DNS resolution.....

Thanks but unfortunately, my patience with Redhat ran out. I was able to exchange by box set for Mandrake 8.1 again. I am able to connect to the immediately. Of course there are other problems here but the bottom line is that Mandrake seems to be a much user friendly OS than Redhat. Even the support at Redhat did not seem able to help me in my situation. I am sure they are good but my situation seemed to outdo them.
My first concern here with Mandrake is to be able to use a reliable video player. I want to listen to music videos at realplayer etc. The realplayer does not function properly on my Mandrake, if someone is having success with realplayer or another I would like to know...thanks

My mandrake 8.1 internet connection also worked right away (thank god), although I couldn't figure out a few other things. Like jd300, I am also into the audio/video stuff and I also can't get some things going in mdk 8.1. I did get xmms to play mpg video files correctly (finally), although I don't know how to play my avi files. xmms plays my mp3s good, but I also want to get into downloading songs from places like augiogalaxy, audiognome, and morpheus just like I do in my Windows 98. Can you do that under linux??

What did you do to get Xmms to play your video?

Search the XMMS web site http://www.xmms.org for plugins, I know that in order to play mpeg movies you'll need xmms-smpeg plugin it is on their site under plugins, just put mpeg in search and you'll find it. Regarding Real Player, I don't know why it doesn't work for you guys, there are other video players included with your distro GTV mpeg player and XMovie. A really good one is MPlayer ( playes almost any type of media including Divx, avi and others) but for it to compile correctly you'll need gcc-3.x.x or gcc-2.95.x, the gcc-2.96 that is bundled with your distro is not supported by MPlayer, by the way MPlayer is here.

Search the zeropaid for a list of available peer-to-peer file sharing apps for linux, MacOS and windows. Audiogallaxy client for linux that connects to their servers is on zeropaid too.
Regards, Neo.

Ok thanks Neo. jd300 - at first xmms only played audio. I went into my software manager and installed an add-on called xmms-something... cant remember. It was on my Mandrake CDs that I bought.

OK I have downloaded MPlayer, how do I install it and where do I get the missing file needed to compile it? thanks

you did get mplaer-0.60.tar.gz yeah?

well, uncompress it like normal, and ./configure it.. i can't quite remember which parts it NEEDS to run, I have:

libdvdread 0.9
libdvdcss 0.0.3 (NOT 1.0!!!)
libmp3lame 3.87ish
w32codec

just search for them, it's easy to find them. they're all on the Ogle player site. and if you're on mandrake, search for Penguin Liberation Front, as it's got mdk rpm's for all of them.

I downloaded the file MPlayer-0.60.tar.bz2
What is the precise command to open and install? If it is missing anything how do I go about finding and installing in the correct place? thanks

same as any other bzip2 file

bunzip2 MPlayer-0.60.tar.bz2
tar xvf MPlayer-0.60.tar
cd MPlayer-0.60
./configure
make install

mplayer is a very modular system, and as such may take a while to get going, you'll need th various other fiels too like i said, and so forth. I'd recommend that you used this as a proper challenge to get to grips with linux style programs, and how they interact. and as and when you get it working perfectly, i persoanlly think you'll be pretty pleased, not least cos it's a good program. You will be able to get mplayer running without having those plugins installed correctly, meaning there will be much less file support and features in mplayer, so poke around and try to see if things have been found, such as after you ./configure.. look for anything returning 'no' or such like.