I have an old Toshiba desktop I installed Mandrake 9.1 on, and lots of the hardware worked pretty good. There's no sound, but that's not a big deal. I have a Linksys LNE100TX Etherfast NIC, how do I get it recognized and working so I can use this computer at a server?I figured it would be a good card for linux, since it's so popular.

BTW, I'm still a Linux novice, so if you tell me I have to recompile the kernel or something, I'm gonna need some more help.

Thanks in adance for any help!

-Drew

Try a couple things:

Manny has a very nice hardware config screen: open up Mandrake Config, and go to "hardware". It should have a detection wizard of some sort - I'm sure you tried that already. If not, do.
Poke around in the hardware options, and try to see if it's recognizing any network card, at all.

also, please post any errors you get at startup, and anything you think might be related to networking in the output from typing dmesg at a console.
As well, please post the output from lsmod.

All of this will help us track down the issue.

On a slightly off-topic note: You're planning on using this thing as a server... are you planning on running X on it? I assumed so, since you're installing MDK. If you just plan on using this old thing for webserver, fileserver, firewall, etc, then I'd highly recommend running it in console mode only, no X, in order to get the best performance. In which case, I'd also recommend not using Mandrake, since the focus of that distro is on Desktop and Gui tools. Red Hat has some more advanced console wizards which can set up the things you're looking for.
I'm sure MDK gurus will argue with me, but having installed Mandrake, Debian and Redhat on 2 machines, one my desktop and one a server, I can tell you that from a newb's point of view. wrestling Manny into a decent console-based server is going to be a lot tougher than installing RH9 and using their CLI config wizards.

Hope that helps!
--Rounan