I am setting up a Prolific usb-usb link cable on two Dell laptops. Both of them recognise it and both of them load the usbnet module, but when I do ifconfig usb 192,168.0.1 as given in the Linux-usb instructions for this cable I am told "Broken pipe". I have no idea what this means and no amount of googling or LinuxQuestioning finds an explanation.

I seem to remember when trying this cable a while ago, unsuccessfully due to ignorance, with Mandrake, seeing something about "initialising interface usb0" during the bootup, and there is no mention of that with these Slackware boxes. I also remember doing config files in /etc/sysconfig, but I do not have that folder. I also recollect something about setting up NFS in order to read files on the other computer. Could I have omitted to install something? I did not install everything. Anyone know? Incidentally I do ifconfig -a and the usb0 is listed.