LinuxQuestions.org - problems connecting over PPPoE

I am trying to clean the polution of microsoft from my mysterious black box, and Mandrake 10.1 is up and running nicely... except that i cannot connect to the internet.

A couple days ago, Mandrake was making the connection, but i could not disconnect (never before in my life have i seen a message that a disconnect failed). So, i decided that that was good enough and reformatted my drive to get rid of windows and try to reinstall mandrake and set it up the same as before.

I try to connect with Mandrake. It prompts for the username (which i have) and the password (which i also have) and i get the message that the system does not seem to have a connection, try to reconfigure or check the line.

I loaded Knoppix and it could not even ping the server.

Windows, however, will connect perfectly every time.

I have an integrated Rhine II fast Ethernet card and a Realtek card that i threw in to see if it made any difference, but no avail.

Both are detected during startup; i have tried to turn the integrated card off and go with the regular one and vise versa.

I am in germany, so i have to use PPPoE; the wire goes from my computer to a white box the germans call a DSL router, from there to a splitter to the wall.

I had to make the "noapic" modification to get it to load. I did some other minor things to make the internet work the first time, such as put a "1" in the debug section of the config box (the other fields are blank), but none of that is working now.

Can Anybody tell me how to make this thing work?