I'm new to the whole "Linux" thing. But I can't seem to get my DSL set up on it. I really don't know what I'm doing wrong, but whenever I try to set up the connection, it won't activate. Any tips or pointers or anything, really?

Well, one recommendation would be to upgrade from Red Hat 9 to something in the Fedora Core series, preferably Fedora Core 4. You can think of Fedora Core 1 as Red Hat 10, and the most recent release is Fedora Core 4. The look and feel of the distribution is quite similar to Red Hat 9.

As far as your particular question goes, the setup will depend on your configuration. Is the line from the DSL modem going straight to the network interface on your computer, or is there a router between them? Many Internet service providers require a username and password to activate the DSL connection, and the transfer of this username/password information usually takes place via PPPoE (point-to-point protocol over ethernet). You need to make sure you are feeding the correct username/password to the DSL modem to activate the connection. If you have a router between the modem and your computer, the router can take care of this, but again, you have to properly configure that portion yourself.

Have you already checked all of that?

There is a router between me and the modem, but I haven't really configured anything with that. Haha. But, is Core 4 expensive at all?

No, Fedora Core 4 is freely available. If you feel comfortable with downloading an ISO file and buring it to CD, then you can go to http://www.linuxiso.org/ to find a server from which to download the necessary ISOs. If you would rather just order the CDs and have them delivered to you (this costs about $5 or so), you can go to http://www.blcds.com/index.php to place your order.

The easiest way to get your DSL setup to work is to have the router pass the necessary information to the mode, and take Linux out of the equation entirely. It will be a very easy setup, I would imagine.

I know I sound really dumb, but have you any links or anything that would show me how to do this? Hehe.

No, you don't sound really dumb. You sound like someone who is interested in trying out Linux for the first time, and that's a good thing. I will give you a few recommendations, and you can choose what you want to do from there. The very first thing I recommend you do is try out what is called a live CD, or, in other words, a Linux distribution that you can try out without having to install anything at all.

One of, if not the, most widely known live CDs is Knoppix, found at http://www.knoppix.org/ . You can click the American/English flag at the top of the page to get it to display in English. You can then click on "Download". I clicked on the [http] link for ecn.purdue.edu near the bottom of the list. Click on "Accept", and then click on "KNOPPIX_V4.0.2CD-2005-09-23-EN.iso". Save it somewhere on your hard drive.

The next part depends on what operating system you are running. I'm going to guess you're running Windows. I'm not sure exactly how to do this in Windows, but there is a way you can check to make sure the ISO file you have was downloaded successfully. On the page where you clicked on "KNOPPIX_V4.0.2CD-2005-09-23-EN.iso", you should be able to find "KNOPPIX_V4.0.2CD-2005-09-23-EN.iso.md5" directly below the link to the ISO file. As of this post, that link said

What this means is that if you run the command "md5sum" on the iso file, which in Linux would look like

in the terminal, the command should print the 1188f6... number to the screen. If the number matches what is shown on the Knoppix website, then your ISO file downloaded successfully. If the numbers don't match, delete the ISO file you downloaded and try again. You may be able to search Google for "md5sum Windows" or some such thing to get an idea for how you can perform this command in Windows.

Once you have a complete ISO file on your hard drive, the next step is to burn it to CD. Almost all CD burning software in Windows have the option to burn a CD image. This is what you want. The ISO file is an image of a CD, and you need to tell your software to burn a CD image with this file. Among other things, this will make the CD bootable.

After you have burned the CD, you can place it in your CD-ROM drive and restart your computer. If your computer is set to boot off the CD-ROM, then you will soon be presented with a Knoppix screen. You can hit F2 or F3 to get some help about the various boot options, but you can also just hit enter and accept the default setup. Very soon you will be staring at a Linux distribution without having to install anything on your hard drive, because your CD-ROM drive and your system memory are the only tools at work.

That is a relatively easy way to try out a Linux distribution without messing with your computer as it stands now. Once you get comfortable playing around a bit in Linux, you can download ISO files for each of the installation CDs for Fedora Core. When you get to that point, either hunt around the web for documentation or come back and post here.

Good idea. I think I'll do that. And, I'll be back. Haha. Thanks for all the help!