OK, so I have Ubuntu 7.04 working quite nicely on a P3 500 with 364MB Ram, a 6gb hdd and a Nvidia Geforce MX-440. now I need to add network cards (2 - 1 for the Internet connnection and one for the home network). Thing is,m theres no obvious place to see what hardware is installed and where I need to install drivers.

I did do a search, both on my Ubuntu installation and on the web, but these sort of, what I consider to be, simple things seem to be missing on most sites. This seems to be a constant problem with Linux, in as much as once its installed, what do you do next?

Anyone?

About what hardware is installed you could use those commands (as root), lspci and lsusb. Dmesg is also a good starting point.

As you are using Ubuntu surely your hardware will be recognized without any problem, but if not, you need to know how system recognizes both cards.

For example, from my lspci -v I get:
Now, dmesg:
So, for my Realtek card I know that my system will use eth0.

From here, ifconfig to configure the cards.

Well, a default Linux install comes with all the most common drivers, so just try inserting the network cards, and when Linux starts, it should automatically detect them.

To see what hardware you have installed, there are some command line commands: lshw and lspci. Open a terminal and type in "man lshw" and "man lspci".

You will also need to configure the network. You can use ifconfig for this. See "man ifconfig" for details.

If something doesn't work, post back here and we'll see what we can suggest you try.

Thanks for the replys guys. I did a bit of exploring and tinkering and got both cards setup fine. I also located some sites with guides to command line instructions, which seem to be invaluable.

http://www.oreillynet.com/linux/cmd/

In case anyone needs pointing in the same direction