well... I just installed redhat linux 7 and there are some (all) things that I don't quite know how to do. My goal is to network the win98 and linux comps. But first things first, how do I tell if my network card is installed? linux doesn't seem to have a device manager. or maybe it does and i don't know. so how do I know if it's installed or not?

this works for all computers with a NIC. ping 127.0.0.1, this is the loopback address and you should always get a reply from this ping 10.0.0.2 (or whatever the address you gave the box) ping 10.0.0.5 (or whatever a different address on your network is) if either of hte first two don't work then there is a problem with how your card is setup. if those two work and the last one does not then there is probably a problem with your subnet mask. you can see what the settings for your NIC are in linux by going to /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 this file holds the info for your card. you can down/up your card by typing: ifdown eth0 ifup eth0 if you make changes to the file then you need to down it then up it again for them to take effect. of course i'm assuming you know to do all this in a terminal editor (ie: command line stuff) reply here if your still having problems. -russ

Thanks for the reply I'll try these things out when I get home from school. but to tell you the truth I'm not exactly sure what to do at a command line in linux for example how do I go about changing "folders" at the command prompt?

Well I can give u some common key commands.. cd FolderName (Change Directory) ls (LiSt directory contents) ls -l (in long format) ls -lR (list recursively) df (DiskFree - hdd space left) cat FileName (display text file) more FileName (as above but prompt at end of page) ps (processes u are running) ps -Af (processes on whole machine) pico (an easy to use console text-editor) emacs (a more powerful but harder to use text editor) vi (a F*(&#%(* impossible to use text editor :) ) which command (find location of 'command' in your path) chmod (change permissions of file) eg: chmod +x filename (make file executeable) chmod g+w filename (make file group writeable) chmod u+r filename (make file user readable) and the most important one: man command (open up a manual page for 'command') You can pipe output from one command to another, eg to display all lines in a textfile that contain the word 'network' you could write cat file.txt | grep 'network' you can even display the line numbers: cat -n file.txt | grep 'network' Anybody else feel free to contribute. Damien.

Wow! thanks a lot for all that. Any ways I pinged the card and got a response, and it'd repeat the response over and over again. now when i do ifdown eth0 or ifup eth0 it just returns usage ifdown device name. also that file your mentioned /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 doesn't seem to exist. so is the card not setup properly or what?