I am running an AMD 64 Sempron with an ATI Radeon 9250 PCI card. I am also very new to linux in general. After a few clean installs of Fedora Core 5, I am having strange lockups on the system. Once I get past GRUB and boot in to Fedora, I will very shortly experience a complete system lockup. It's locked up on the login screen (literally halfway through loading it, too.. half login screen, half white blank wcreen), and it's locked up near immediately after logging in, such as when loading the desktop, or immediately after I attempt to open a folder or program.

Deciding it's probably a video problem after browsing through FAQs and the forums for hours and hours, I wanted to update the drivers, but could not do it with the GUI, so I tried booting init 3, in to text only mode. The system does NOT lock up in this mode. However, for some reason, I cannot connect to the internet with wget, yum, or anything else to update anything (the core, add drivers, etc). I have an onboard ethernet adapter on an Asus mainboard, and it was seen during install. I have tried connecting my cable modem directly to the ethernet port and using my Linksys router, but I can't seem to get a connection.

And I have absolutely no idea how to set up the network in linux, especially from the command line.

Does anyone have ANY idea how I can set up Fedora to at least allow me to connect to the internet so I can run yum and get some updates and the video drivers changed to see if that is the issue? I'm tearing my hair out.

Thanks!

Okay, I will try to offer you my help using your lom.
a) does your linksys act as an DHCP and also connects to cable?
b) what shows you can setup your LOM in init 3 as well using vi and edit the needed files
or you just use as root.
If the answer to a) is yes then you'll have to set your card of course to DHCP but you probably will have to set your DNS to the IP of the linksys Routers IP.
e.g. linksys 192.168.2.1 then this will be the Gateway and DNS IP for your clients.

Ok thanks, I'll give that a shot, and see if it works. My router is connected to the cable, and my computer connects to the router. Also I do not have multiple machines, just mine.

I am going to have a hard time showing my ifconfig since I can't copy it in Linux, boot in to Windows, and paste it, and that's what I have to do right now to actually use the internet to post.

if your network was automatically configured in initlevel 5, just type /sbin/chkconfig --level 35 network on to start network while running initlevel 3

you can look in log /var/log/Xorg.0.log and look for errors there and eventually paste them here

I don't think it automatically configured in initlevel 5, since I've never actually been able to run Xwindow without crashing very shortly after it starts. Thanks for the tips I'll try those real quick here and see what happens. Using "system-network-config" I was able to turn the DHCP field to "on" but I don't know what to put for "Name" and "Device" I think the other two options were. I tried "linksys" for name and "eth0" for device but nothing.

I tried your command "/sbin/chkconfig --level 35 network on" and upon reboot I still had no connection. And I don't know if I was doing something wrong, but when I tried to open "/var/log/Xorg.0.log" it created a new file. I used Vi, I don't know of any other way to look at files in Fedora, and I don't even know how to edit files with Vi (last time I used Linux was FreeBSD on my OS X machine and the text program was pico).

does ifconfig show any device? for your onboard ethernet should be probably name eth0. config for this card should be then in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts and look like this:

DEVICE=eth0
BOOTPROTO=dhcp
HWADDR=00:00:00:00:00:00
ONBOOT=yes

Ok, ifconfig says:
..and a few other things below it, but just packet loss type information, so I excluded it.

Also, I did go to /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts but found nothing that had an "eth0" in it that looked like a configuration file. The only config file I believe that was in that directory was an init.ipv6 file.

Also, for informational purposes, I ran lspci:
Thanks for all the help so far, at the very least I am learning a lot about Linux!

so the ifconfig shows only loopback device...it seems that you have no driver for the ethernet card loaded. I tried to find which driver to use and probably it is uli526x. try looking here. you can also put here lsmod output and parts of dmesg with something you think that would be related to the network card.

Ok, I ran some commands that you told me about.

lsmod returned absolutely nothing with eth, ALi, or ULi in it.