i have 2 dual boot boxes, xp& 98, and mandrake 7 & 98. I'm also on a WAN with a few neighbours. But I can't see anybody from the mandrake side. Using a DLink DFE+ 305 I think in that box. New to linux too, so this experience might be my make or break with Linux. Help???

not really a reply, but another q. can knoppix run from HDD? and would i have more luck networking w/ knoppix?

What do you mean "can't see anybody"?

Can you ping anyone? another workstation? the gateway? the DNS server?

What does the command "ifconfig" give you?
What does the command "route" give you?

how do i do that?

Well, the first thing you have to do is find out the IP address of one of your neighbours' machines. Then you open a console (command prompt) and enter this:

ping <IP Address of neighbours machine>

That command should come back with either a list of times in ms (the "ping" time to the given IP Address) or something like "Host unreachable" if your machine couldn't connect to the other one.

If you do get a response, then your TCP/IP networking is functioning properly and you are connected to the network, this means whatever problem you are having is at a higher protocol.

If you don't get a response, there's a TCP/IP problem.

In this case you would need to enter:

ifconfig

at the command prompt. This will give you a readout of your ethernet interfaces (network cards). You should have one called "eth0", and it should be assigned an IP address from the LAN, if it doesn't have an IP address (0.0.0.0), or it has an outside one, then you either need to give it a static IP yourself, or set it up for DHCP.

If ping doesn't give you anything and the IP address appears to be configured properly, you may have a routing problem, which can be partially diagnosed by entering:

route

at the command line. This will print out your routing table.

Try these and let me know what happens, maybe cut and paste the results if you can...