question on setting up internet capabilities
 

im running mandrake 9.2, just set it up. it doesnt wanna detect my lan connection. my network card is integrated onto my mb (asus a7n8x) and im also useing a netgear router(dont know if that will make a difference). anyways im new to linux, so any advice would be great!

oh yeah, its cable internet connection.
thanx

The biggest issue will be just getting the network card working. Once you get that far, you're home free. Cable/DSL setup with a router is fairly simple.

I assume your router will handel all the connections with the ISP (cable company), so you don't need to worry about that. Your Local gateway will be your router. It might be necessary to populate the DNS (name server) entries for your box (resolv.conf) and make them the same as what your router says (should be automagically populated from your cable company). It is completely up to you if you want to use DHCP or a static IP. Just make sure you assign an IP that is not already taken (probably something like 192.168.1.123 or whatever -- most routers assume the 192.168.x.x range, although most recent ones will allow you to change that).

If your can never get your built in NIC to be detected, you can try buying a known good NIC for Mandrake. As much as I know, Mandrake has always had great support for NICs -- even my Linksys (v5) TX100 card that debian hates, Mandrake (and RedHat and Fedora) had no problems with it. You'll want to do some research to see if anyone has been able to get that integrated NIC to work. It might even require loading a kernel module or even recompiling the kernel (this used to be a much more common way to solve a poorly supported NIC issue). So, you could waste hours/days of your time, or spend about $15. The choice is yours.