Can anyone help? I installed Mandrake Linux v10.0 community distribution on my laptop with the profile as follow.

PIIIM 1Ghz
I830 Graphic Chipset
27GB Harddisk
Realtek 8139 Ethernet Interface Card

I can't get an IP from my Windows XP Desktop running Internect Connection Sharing.
Thus, I set the static IP but it just prompt up saying the IP is not in correct format. (192.168.0.7) Hence I do it in console:

ifconfig eth0 192.168.0.6 netmask 255.255.255.0 up

And I do ifconfig and got this:

eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:E0:18:7D:17:3E
inet addr: 192.168.0.6 Bcast 192.168.0.255 Mask: 255.255.255.0
inet6 addr: fe80::2e0::18ff:fe7d:173e/64 Scope: Link
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU: 1500 Metric: 1
RX packets: 1831 errors: 0 dropped: 0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets: 99 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns: 0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes: 228402 (233.0kb) TX bytes: 15004 (14.6Kb)
Interrupt: 10 Base address: 0xd000

But stil, I cant get the browser to browse any website. And when I get into the Mandrake control center, in the "Monitor connections", it just say "Not connected". How can I configure it so it can surf the internet properly? or it doesnt support windows xp as an internet gateway?

you need to set your gateway, and nameserver.

route add default gw xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx

then edit /etc/resolv.conf, add

nameserver xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx

make sure you don't have a firewall problem. to make the gateway permanent i believe you need to edit /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifconf-eth0.
hope that helps.
good luck.

I have tried to set the default gateway and static ip in the etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 file
with the following context:

DEVICE=eth0
BOOTPROTO=static
IPADDR=192.168.0.7
NETMASK=255.255.255.0
NETWORK=192.168.0.1
ONBOOT=yes
MII_NOT_SUPPORTED=yes
NEEDHOSTNAME=no

But the system is unable to load any web page stil. I have successfully ping the IP of the other computer within the same network but not any outside web url.
I tried to ping www.yahoo.com but it returns
ping: unknown host www.yahoo.com

is there something to deal with dns setting or else?

check your firewall settings on the xp machine. did you edit your resolv.conf?