I am an absolute infant with regards to Linux but I've just taken the plunge and installed Fedora 6 on my Dell Inspiron 6000 laptop (after unsuccefully trying to dual-boot xp with Fedora on a USB external), and I'm having a few issues. The most pressing is that I can't seem to get it to recognize either my ethernet connection or my wireless. They are both listed in Network Device Control and Network Configurations, but in both applications any attempt to activate them give me the message:

Error for wireless request "Set Encode" (882A)
SET failed on device eth1 ; No such device.

Determining IP information for eth1... SIOCSIFADDR: No such device
eith1: unkown interface: No such device
eith1: unkown interface: No such device
failed.

Should that message come up "Error for wireless" even when I'm trying to activate my ethernet? I also wonder why it is that the install program could use my ethernet connection to download packages from FedoraExtras, then when the OS is running it can't recognize the same connection it used during installation...
The books that I have don't get into this sort of trouble-shooting (it may be really simple and they assume that the reader has some knowledge... I've subsequently gone out and bought Linux for Dummies). I'm hoping that once I've read through them a little more I will be equipt to deal with this sort of thing myself. But I already havn't been able to check my e-mail from my own computer for a week - I can't really afford the time to read three giant books before I can do something so simple. Is there an easy fix to this or should I just bite the bullet?

Thanks in advance for your help!

run 'ifconfig' from a root prompt and post the output here.