I was trying to do a Suse 9.0 ftp install and i put in the ftp address and it says ip address not recognized i tried a bunch of tings but couldn't figure it out any help would be greatly appreciated.

After the cd boots highlight installation and then in the boot options(promt) enter:
install=ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/
Or type in an ftp mirror. When it asks for the directory to get the install files you will see somthing like....
/pub/suse/i386/ just finish the file path with "current". Not 9.0.
/pub/suse/i386/current
Seemed to work for me so far. I'm still watching it install right now. Good luck.
Also, I have not tried entering a mirror ftp location. I entered the example above. I'm sure a mirror location would go faster, this is going ssslllllllooooooooooooooowwwww.

The boot options(prompt) never worked for me. That seemed obvious since it seemed to only boot to the CD and didn't load anything for the network card.

What I did was continue with the Manual installation option, then select the proper module for my network card from those given.

After that, I continued into the Network installation option, only then could I have it go to an FTP server. Luckily, I was behind DHCP, so the card just picked up the settings, configuring for DSL or Cable first might be a tad impossible, I assume?

Anyway, ftp://sunsite.cnlab-switch.ch/mirror/SuSE/suse/i386/9.0 gave me great rates seeing as how the SuSE FTP server was totally full.