Slack 9: networking, the internet, and life in general
 

Ok so i installed slack 9 earlier, install went fine, network setup worked and all. network card is an onboard, SiS900 chipset thingy(or so slack and a few other distros told me). after install i followed the networking faq here , and i managed to get eth0 working. The way my small network is setup, my internet(cable) goes through my windows box from Cable Modem via USB. Windows shares the connection via Internet Connection Sharing(i KNOW this works, because earlier i had SuSE and Mandrake installed and they both were able to get online), then i have windows box and slack box plugged into a switch via ethernet cards. so far, i managed to get lan working(can ping each host from the other and such), but i cant manage to get to the internet from the slack box, which is somewhat really important for what i wanted to use it for. i have a feeling its just not recognizing the gateway, or doesnt even know to go there, but i have no idea how to remedy this. any ideas? much thanks and props to anyone who does! ^^

edit: also, i notice that after boot, ifconfig doesnt list eth0 at all. ifconfig -a does, but it doesnt have any inet addr or mask or anything assigned to it. if i do `ifconfig eth0 192.168.0.2 broadcast 192.168.0.255 netmask 255.255.255.0` it makes lan work, but i have to input manually every bloody time, and that doesnt seem right..

You can use the netconfig utility, or you can manually edit /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1 and modify it according to your configuration.
Additionally you may need to modify /etc/resolv.conf and add your DNS server(s).

the way windows ICS works is that every request(dns especially) is just simply forwarded through the windows box via whatever settings are on it, so its almost transparent, just like a router or some such thing. but i know its not a dns problem, because even trying to ping something outside via ip doesnt work.

also, netconfig really didnt do a bloody thing to help, and i ended up manually editing rc.inet1 anyways, which also did seemingly nothing

have you setup your default route?

eg: route add -net default gw 192.168.0.1 metric 1

???

actually..yeah..about 9 times..but when i did it that time..huh..it worked..hooray!! almost. it still wont save any of this crap when i restart, so the mystery continues...