I've got an IBM G40 with windows dual booting with SUSE 9.1 Pro. I can't get my Ethernet card to work, I've configured it with a static IP address for use on my home network. I set up a couple of other SUSE boxes for a freeciv game in the same way and they talk to each other fine. The card gets activated according to the bootlog but it doesn't show any lights (one flickers a bit) and there is nothing showing on my ethernet switch. Any ideas would be helpful, I've looked at most of the YaST options and poked around in some config files but haven't found anything useful.

It would be helpful to know what NIC you're using and which driver is actually being loaded for it. It sounds like you have the wrong driver, but that's just a guess without any real information to work with.

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

I am a relative Newbie to Linux, I've been using it less than a year and no one else I know used it before me (some of my friends do now!). I am not sure what you mean by a NIC, the only reference I could find was Network Information Centre and I don't think I've got one of those. You should understand that I specialize in bodging jury rigged networks that use about half the software, hardware and other tings they're supposed to. That aside I can't get any access from my laptop using ssh (or anything else) to my other computers, although they can talk among themselves. If this is any help the SuSE hardware listing is below:

IBM Ethernet Controller

Type: Ethernet controller
Vendor: Broadcom

Driver Info #0:
Driver Status: tg3 is active
Driver Activation Cmd: "modprobe tg3"
Driver Info #1:
Driver Status: bcm5700 is not active
Driver Activation Cmd: "modprobe bcm5700"