I am having a problem booting up when the ethernet cable is not plugged into eth0. During the boot it will hang when it gets to the DHCP section of startup

The next line is typically when I have a connection:

But I never get beyond the MAC address without connection.

I obviously use DHCP but when I am on the go with my laptop a connection is not always available.

I am looking for a way to help this by either:

A) pressing a combonation of buttons at this point in the boot to skip DHCP
B) shortening the number of tries to 1 or 2

Oh yeah, I am running Slackware 10 (2.6.8 kernel) if that changes the game at all.

I am not sure how to do this on slackware but you can comment out in the network config file to have it not startup on boot. Then, when you are connected, manually start the interface and it will grab the dhcp address. For an example on a debian machine you can look in the /etc/network/interfaces file or on a redhat machine you will see the option in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-ethx.

That sounds like it would work, but certainly there must be a better way. I've personally seen linux machines that skip over eth0 if it is not connected I just don't know how it did it.

Anyone ?

Look at /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1/conf and you will have your interfaces listed here. Change this USE_DHCP[X] = ""

The default one will have USE_DHCP[0] = "yes" This was my wired card to it will hang when i was portable on my laptop. If you change this to "" for the 0 card and say your wireless card is eth1 then make the rc.inet1.conf have USE_DHCP[1] = "yes"
I now don't see any dhcpcd: Mac Address = macaddy.

But after logging as root I can do ifconfg and now my wireless card received an ip address so this should fix your problem. It fixed mine.

juice