I have recently installed Maya 8.0 on Suse Linux 10.2. Maya 8.0 requires you to have an ethernet device installed on your computer in order to licence maya.

I'm very sad that my computer has no ethernet hardware whatsoever. I do have a bluetooth dongle that I used as an ethernet device for Maya 8.0 on windows xp. It acts as an ethernet device because it installs bluetooth LAN on windows and it shows up as a LAN device in the network connections in windows.

Now either I must find a way on linux to get my bluetooth dongle to act as a LAN ethernet device with a 12 digit ethernet address or I must find a "virtual ethernet adapter" for linux.

I seriously hope I can get my bluetooth dongle to act as a ethernet device.

Also if I manage to do that how do I find out the ethernet address of it?

If your computer has a PCI slot, why don't you just spring for the $10 ethernet card and be done with it? It sounds like the software simply wants to register against a single static unique ID, which the MAC ROM on the ethernet card provides. If this is correct, you might not even need a fully functional ethernet card.
The only other alternative I can think of, might be to modify an existing ethernet driver, so that it doesn't bail on startup if it doesn't see any hardware, and to provide all services to the kernel, even in the absense of real hardware. This sounds like a fair bit of work, but could be the nucleus of an interesting project.

--- rod.