So I'm a complete newbie to Linux, and I've been playing around with SuSE 9 for a while but can't get my onboard NIC to be detected...I've tried everything I can think of and everything google has brought up (latest drivers etc.) but it never gets detected and never works when I configure it manually. What's going wrong? My board is a Microstar K7N2GM-L (nforce2 chipset with RealTek NIC) with an AMD Athlon 3200+ and I'm dual-booting SuSE with XP Home.

EDIT: forgot to mention, my connection is a 1Mb cable connected to a Motorola Surfboard 4100 cable modem.

yo, mrself. i think you need to install the nforce drivers.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux_nforce_1.0-0261

but i'm not exactly sure since i don't use an nforce chipset. if worst comes to worst, just throw in a cheap nic card and use that. for cable modem connections, you shouldn't have to do anything special to get your internet connection going. it should be automatically detected using dhcp (if you have it set to use dhcp).

That was my first port of call when it wouldn't work, and I've since reinstalled the same driver several times just to make sure...I may try out another distro instead if I can't get this working, which is annoying because SuSE seemed good and I've just got used to it. I can't use Linux with no internet, and Windows is just, well, Windows...but since it gets me online I have no choice right now

well, like i said, you could just slap in a generic nic card. also, how are you installing the nforce drivers? are you doing it exactly as outlined in the README or INSTALL file? IIRC, you can't install them with the Xserver running.

Yeh I'm installing by the book, might try a fresh install and updating the drivers immediately but I'm not holding much hope for that. I'd stick a different NIC card in but I don't have one, and getting a new distro would be less hassle than finding someone with one to spare. Thanks for the help anyway, maybe I'll get hold of a new NIC sometime and be able to give SuSE a proper try.

hmm... my guess is that getting a hold of a generic nic card isn't going to be more of a hassle than reinstalling linux. and they're pretty dern cheap anyways. but to each his own...

You're greatly underestimating my laziness here!! I'd be happy to accept whichever option came along first...I'll give Xandros a try, and then move onto Fedora when I know what's what.

Fedora and Nforce you have to pray to get the drivers to work. I installed fedora on my box at work, which is an Nforce2, and sure enough, i had all sorts of headaces

SuSE is a good distro. I've used Mandrake before, but now am firmly in the SuSE camp (what better distro with IBM's money shortly to be available after they buy Novell).

Which problem do you want to tackle first,... the video card or the network card???

My suggestion is that you do one at a time rather than trying to do both simultaneously. The YAST2 setup tools are good, but not that good. And for the video, you really need to use the nVidia stuff found on their website.