Ok, I just installed Red Hat 9.0 last night and I'm having more than my share of trouble.

First off, my soundcard appears to not be supported by and distribuion of linux at all, which doesnt suprise me.

but the thing that really gets me is that my network card isnt recognized, and doesnt have explicit support.

Ive got a Kingston EtheRx VP 10/100Base-TX PCI Fast Ethernet Adapter (Model: KNE110TX).

(1) Kingston is not on the list for the Internet Configuartion Wizard in System Tools
(2) I cannot find anywhere on the internet that has Linux drivers for this card
(3) I've found a place that gives an explanation of how to install drivers for it using the name "tulip" and that seems all fine and dandy... But what in the name of God is X Server and where can I find it...?

From my searches it also looks like it works with the tulip driver. It's very popular driver and you have it in the system. I don't know what does the installation manual you found says, but what I think:
1) Open a terminal
2) Type 'su'+enter
3) Type root password when it asks you
4) Type 'modprobe tulip'+enter
5) If no errors, it means it's loaded. Now you can assign IP address to it (from console 'ifconfig eth0 yourIP' or using GUI tools).

X Server is a part of GUI. If you're running KDE or GNOME or any other window manager, you're running the X Server, too. It allows the window managers to do draw something, to control keyboard, mouse and so on.

ok ive done that and i entered ifconfig eth0 192.168.1.7 and that works ok, but it doesnt do anything to help me get connected to the internet....

also, i tried running modprobe from a user account and i got an error saying it didnt know what modprobe was, but when i ran it from the root user it ran ok

typed in su nothing happened
typed in modprobe tulip nothing happened
typed in ifconfig eth0 192.168.1.7 and nothing happened
typed ifconfig and eth0 finally showed up under it

but another problem ive found is that when i type lspci it shows my ethernet controller as a card i dont even own or have installed...

In the commands you entered no output means no error. That's a good thing.
Another thing I forgot to write earlier: modprobe can be run by root only. After configuring your Net access, you'll need to add it to boot scripts (to configure it every boot), but we'll do it later.

Now you have the card configured. One step is left: routing table. You probably have a gateway (default gateway). You should know its IP or have it written somehwere. What you need to do now is to configure it. The command is
route del default
to delete what's left and then
route add default gw gatewayIP
Now you should be able to ping machines using their IPs.

Now DNS. Maybe you already have it configured (from installation), in such case you should be able to ping hosts using their names, access WWW and so on. If you don't have DNS configured, edit /etc/resolv.conf (only root has write access to this file). It's simple. You neeed to fill it this way
nameserver dnsip1
nameserver dnsip2
You should have your DNS IPs written somewhere.

What does lspci show you?

ok i can ping the gateway (my test) by ip, so tahts all working fine
i can also access the GUI for the router thru mozilla.

as for /etc/resolv.conf i cant access it thru the GUI because "nautalis does not have a viewer capable of opening this file or something" and i cant access it thru the console because it says permission denied.... and yes i am logged on as root

as for lspci it says my ethernet controller is a lite-on communications inc LNE100tx (rev 20) when its actually the kensington one i posted further up....

You can access the file using
su
kate /etc/resolv.conf
or running any graphical editor this way. In the example above kate will run with the file (as root).

lspci lists the chip correctly, KNE110TX and LNE100tx seem to be very close. They may just look the same for the system...

kate returns an error.... but as for the lspci comment, ill take your word for it.

what would be something else i could try instead of kate...?

awesome!

i finally took a wild guess that kate was a text editor on another distribution and decided to try gedit /etc/resolv.conf and it worked! and i now have intenet!

thank you very very much for your help!

expect to see a thread popping up soon with me asking about how to set up my sound card :P

arg i need to know about those boot scripts dont i...

i just restarted and everything went to hell

sorry about the triple posting btw

Ok...the script
It's simply a list of commands that starts your network. Copy the code and paste it to /etc/rc.d/rc.local file (at the end). rc.local is one of the starting scripts, last one and a good place to put your special commands to run as boot (rc.local requires root access as resolv.conf, but you can edit it easily now ). Save the file and reboot to test it.

You don't need to modify /etc/resolv.conf in any way.