Hello all, I'm a relatively experienced computer geek and have been diving in and out of the world of Linux for a few years now, most recently Jolicloud for it's easy setup. However, it's easy setup is making it extremely limiting and the interface is bugging me, which eventually lead me to Zenwalk. Great OS for development, but I cannot get the internet to work for anything.

I am on a wired ethernet setup, the card is a PCI card, the lights are all on, the card shows up in the hardware profile with a seemingly accurate driver and I can't seem to find any fault there. But my experience is admittedly limited so I'm open to suggestions for verifying the hardware is working.

As far as software, I've tried a few things but I'm fairly lost so I think it'd be best to assume I haven't tried anything and just offer up all the advise you've got.

Sorry to be such a newbie in distress, I just really love this OS but it's hard to be a web developer without the web :\

Thanks in advance for any help you can offer!

EDIT: forgot, few details here... results of ifconfig eth0:
eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:26:18:7a:25:82
UP BROADCAST MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:0(0.0B) TX bytes:0(0.0B)
Interrupt:27 Base address:0x6000

Have you tried using wicd? It's probably the most handy network manager out there, for both wired and wireless connections.
If it's not pre-installed, the best way to get it is to just download the tarball and slap it onto a flash drive, then migrate it to Zenwalk and install it there from a terminal. After that, type:
and it should activate the client, at which point a small icon will show up in your system tray.

From there it should be as easy as clicking the icon in the tray and setting up your connection, given that you know some basic things about your connection type, which it seems you do.

What desktop environment are you working under? I believe the GNOME version of Zenwalk has wicd pre-installed.

I'm using the XFCE version and it does come preinstalled with wicd. That's actually what I'm using. The error log shows:

Autoconnecting...
No wired connection present, attempting to autoconnect to wireless network
Unable to autoconnect, you'll have to manually connect
Putting interface down
Releasing DHCP leases...
Setting false IP...
Flushing the routing table...
Putting interface up...
Setting static IP: 192.168.0.10
Setting default gateway: 192.168.0.1
Connecting thread exiting.
Sending connection attempt result Success

But I'm still not connected and not able to connect. Any other ideas or suggestions?

That really looks weird. You are not getting assigned an IP address to the interface according to the output of your ifconfig.

Does your LAN support DHCP? If not, have you configured the wired interface to have the proper gateway, mask and IP address range(s)?

Also, what is the make model number of your adapter. I would think most (as in 99.99% or better) would be supported, but it is possible that you have a "windows" model (much like the old win modems) where the work is done in software. You should be able to use the lspci command and grep for your Ethernet card to get this information.

I've tried it both ways, automatically getting a dynamic IP and statically setting the gateway, mask and IP. The static method gave me the error log I posted before, the dynamic method gives me the following:

Putting interface up
Running DHCP with hostname zenwalk **NOTE: not sure if this is correct or if there's a special value I should be using
dhcpcd: version 5.2.2 starting
dhcpcd: eth0: waiting for carrier
dhcpcd: timed out
DHCP connection failed
exiting connection thread
Sending connection attempt result dhcp_failed

My make model number is a Trendnet TEG-PCITXRL. I don't think it's a Windows only or anything like that, but I'm not 100% sure. There seems to be some sort of driver for it, as it does show up in the hardware profile and does have a driver.

I really love this OS I just need the internet to work and it's driving me crazy. I'm sure it's something stupid, like one little flag I don't have set or something that's preventing it from working.

Anything else I can try?

Based up your output, I do think that the OS is not seeing the adapter. Both methods are saying that it is not picking up the DHCP server, but the lights are blinking meaning that the adapter hardware is seeing the carries signal and bit twiddling.

Have a look at this thread. It suggests a couple of network diagnostic tools that I haven't used (or seen before). Specifically it recommends running lshw -C network, mii-tool -v or ethtool as these will tell you what the OS 'sees' as far as the adapter. There is also a link to drivers for the card. These might give you some more diagnostic information.

One thing I once ran into on Slackware, with Zenwalk being in many ways similar, is that the generic kernel did not automatically load all of the modules necessary for the hardware. It was necessary to run a script that created an ram image that was loaded at boot with these modules. You could be facing that. However, I saw this card reviewed on the LQ hardware compatibility list and 4 out of 5 said that it worked out of the box, while the 5th said that it didn't.

I've resolved it. Its weird, I had put in a PCI ethernet card because after a power outage, Windows no longer recognized the original integrated one (and it still doesn't recognize it), but for some odd reason when I switched back to the integrated one in Linux the internet worked. So now I just have to swap ethernet ports depending on which OS I'm currently using.

Strange, hacky, but it works so I'll take it.

Thanks for the help everyone.