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?

Okay,
the network interface that you are trying to bring up the DSL on should not have an IP address bound to it so it should something like this:

eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:05:4E:44:93:BE
UP BROADCAST RUNNING 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:199
RX bytes:0 (0.0 b) TX bytes:0 (0.0 b)
Interrupt:11 Memory:f9820000-f9830000


Notice the absence of IP address. Next try and sniff the connection when you are "dialling" your DSL

tcpdump -i eth0 -n

Have a look at what happens in there, google it. If you can't find anything post the results of the sniff.

Obviously use your network interface name if it is different to eth0

Seeya,
Finn.

um... sorry to seem ignorant, but i am a little new to the whole "text based" shell thing; i am mostly using the KDE 3.2 interface. How do i bring up the fields that you have posted there?

By using a terminal emulator (or term). KDE uses Konsole, it should look like a screen with a little shell infront.

Seeya,
Finn.