Hi,
I too am a newbie at this. I have an AMD 2.6g processor on an Abit nf7-s motherboard with 256meg of ram and a 27gig hard drive on which I installed Suse 9.0 Pro. The problem I am having is that I cannot get to the internet. From a terminal I did a dmesg | more and found that the system did not auto dectect the on-board network card so thru Yast I installed the
driver for that device. Now dmesg | more shows the etho with no defects.
I did a cat /proc/net/dev and that told me that the ethercard had a zeros in the errs column. I did a cat /proc/interrupts and that told me the ethercard is set to 3. And lastly from the how toos' on disk one is to do an ifconfig.
I got back "bad command" when I tpyed that in. So a friend suggested to do "where ifconfig" at the terminal and that gave me a bad command.
Am I typing the command right? Do I need to add an argument to it? Or am I missing the if command. I also tried typing ifup and got a bad command.
Help. Scott

What kind of ethernet card do you have? To do the commmand ifconfig you need to be logged in as root. Su to root and try it again, if it still says bad command try /sbin/ifconfig. Something else you may want to try is ifconfig eth0 up which brings up which ever ethernet card is at eth0.

Tried both commands it looks like good data returned with the ifconfig command but when I typed ifconfig eth0 up it returned unknown interface: no such device. The on-board nic is a realtek 8201bl. went to realteks' homepage and it said that the 8201 was the same as the 8129/8139 so that is what I used for drivers. Just went to Realteks' pages and it states that the 8201bl does not need any drivers. So what to do now? Delete the eth0 info?

try this: su to root, and do an 'lsmod' then look at the results and see if a module called 8139too or something like that is loaded. Then post back here if it isn't. What this is doing is checking to see what modules are currently loaded in the kernel. If it's not loaded you can try this '/sbin/modprobe 8139too' ...I'm really suprised that suse does not detect that card because one) it's a very common card and 2) suse has a very good hardware detection program...YaSt.

but try that.

Back Again. I switched hard drives on that mobo and in win98se the device
manager says the network card is a Nvidia nForce MCP networking adaptor.
So I am thinking that I need to get some specs from Nvidia about the properties of that network adapter. I have written them on another issue (3d graphics) and asked them about the network card also. Maybe they will write back. Thank you for your time and effort. Will advise you when I here back from them. If you would could you send me your e-mail address.

Scott

If your card is an nForce then more than likely you have the nForce chipset also..see this link for drivers.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux.html