Okay - I was hooked up DSL to my Windows box because I knew if the hardware was good, the connection would probably work, what with bellsouth and Windows being hand in hand. So the hardware's good. And I was trying to post here and failing - the connection was fine and I could access pages - it just jammed on my post. Maybe jeremy got tired of me posting? *g*

So I stuck the modem in my Slack box and ran adsl-setup. Simple questions, simply answered and it failed. So I rebooted with Knoppix in the drive and clicked on the Mozilla icon and I'm surfing. How is this possible? *NO* configuration of any kind. How the hell does it know what my ISP is? Is it reading the Slack files somehow? Then why didn't they work?

And I said this elsewhere - why can't every Linux distro work like this? This is unreal.

*cough* So, um... the hardware detection and connection-implementation is mind-boggling but what's wrong with my Slack? It just timed out and sent "Connect#" > /dev/nul &1>&2 or something like that. So I'm completely mystified by Slack and Knoppix, for completely different reasons. Any clarity would be greatly appreciated.

What type of DSL connection you talking about? Internal PCI modem, external USB one or a router of some kind?

cheers

Jamie...

Oops. Sorry - I'm just so freaked. External Westell ADSL modem hooked to ethernet. SiS 900 10/100 Ethernet, apparently.

So its an external box that gives you an ethernet port?

If this is the case then from the point of view of the linux box you are not setting up an ADSL connection, you are just setting up a normal network connection. You should just be able to set your machine to get its address by DHCP and I imagine you'll be up and cooking.

HTH

Jamie...

Ah. Like my burner won't work because I haven't figured out how to tell it it's really a SCSI... even though it isn't. *g* Okay - thanks for that tip - now I just have to go learn about DHCP. I'm very bad with networking and modems of any kind but I've never had DSL in my life, so I'm completely lost. Thanks - I might well have driven myself completely over the edge trying to make it work as an ADSL connection.

This Knoppix thing still blows me away, though. When I first booted it yesterday, my immediate reaction was "Wow" which quickly turned to "Not that impressed." Booting again today, I'm back to "Wow" and beyond.

Anyway - thanks again! (I'll probably be back.)

If its a slack box then you should either run netconfig from the command line, or edit /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1 directly

cheers

Jamie...

Slacksurfing! Thank you. *whooosh*

Um. Small problem. Eerily like the dial up. I can't REconnect. I was playing with getting my cd-burner working and had added

append = "hdc=ide-scsi hdd=ide-scsi"

and rebooted and then edited fstab

/dev/scd0 /mnt/dvd iso9660 noauto,users,ro 0 0
/dev/scd1 /mnt/cdrw iso9660 noauto,users 0 0

and then realized the doc I was following along with had been pulled out of cache because when I wanted to look elsewhere for something else, I got a "could not be found" error and so on with everything I tried. I repeated the netconfig process and nothing. Stuck the Knoppix disk back in and here I am - it's not hardware or my ISP.

I'm approximately half a millimeter from formatting Slack off my drive. I haven't done a damn thing but configureconfigureconfigure. Breakbreakbreak. Fixbreakfixbreak. %$%#*&$

Um. Sorry. So any idea what could be wrong? I'm clueless because, despite making potentially drastic changes, those changes have nothing to do with the net. I haven't changed a thing about it. I'd really appreciate any help. I really want to make this work and not just give up but there's only so much I can take.