Trouble initializing eth0 - Red Hat 9
 

Greetings. This is my first time experimenting on my own with Linux (installing it and setting it up), and I seem to be having problems figuring out how to get it to recognize that I do in fact have a network card installed in the machine.

I have my machine set up in sort of a retarded manner because I'm not familiar with partitioning the drives, and implementing a dual boot system, so what I did is left my one drive with Windows XP on it, and I installed Red Hat on a seperate drive. When I need to use either one, I just turn the computer off and swap the IDE ribbon between drives. Now, obviously my card is working here in XP because I'm typing this message.

I'm using a Earthlink speed stream dsl modem, with a netgear fs105 ethernet switch and a netgear fa311 NIC. When I boot into the Linux drive, it fails bringing up the interface eth0 and interface ppp0, and says it fails in determining my IP info. I'm pretty sure that I don't have a static IP address, because in the past, I have had to update my IP address for people using my FTP server. I was going to try getting that Roaring Penguin PPPOE program, but I am having issues copying into onto disk from my Windows drive and getting it onto the Linux drive. But before I can even tackle that problem, when I ifconfig eth0, I don't get anything. Basically it says it doesn't work.

I read through some other similar posts of this nature, but since I am extremely ignorant at this point in time, I was hoping someone would possess the kindness to give me a helping hand. Thanks.