I am having some trouble getting a Mandrake Linux 9.1 virtual machine to connect to my network. The physical machine is an Athlon XP 1800+ with onboard NIC, connected directly to a cable modem. The guest OS (using VMware) is Mandrake Linux 9.1. On boot, it says "Bringing Up eth0 [FAILED]" I assume this is where the problem starts, but I am not sure how to fix it. Has anyone gotten a VMware guest OS network access before? If so, how did you do it?

It sounds to me like those message are coming up after the kernel has loaded, and are part of the startup scripts. It sounds like your scripts are attempting to obtain an IP address from the card automatically (most likely via dhcp). So my questions to you are these: 1) Is your card actually connected to a network? If not, then obviously you won't be able to obtain an IP address from a DHCP server, since none are present. 2) If you are connected to a network, does it have a DHCP server, or do you need to configure the IP address manually? In either case above, if your attempting to get an IP via dhcp, the dhcp service makes attempts for 60 seconds, and then decides it's not going to happen and fails. That means that your system sits there waiting for 60 seconds. (60 seconds may not be the actual period of time, but it's a good rough estimate). Now assuming that what you need to do is disable dhcp, your going to have to comment out the relavent lines in your startup config scripts, and replace them with lines relating to a statically assigned IP address. How you do that.. I don't know. Maybe someone else will be kind enough to post a follow up explaining the details of that procedure on a redhat box (since all I'm familiar with is slackware). Another possibility is that your card is not supported by your current kernel. I'm not terribly familiar with the software that new kernels support, but it seems likely that a newer one might help. If that's the case, you need to compile yourself a new kernel containing support for your card. You should begin by reading the Kernel-HOWTO, if you want to do this. You should then get a copy of the source for a recent kernel (2.4.18 is the latest stable that I know of), and read the README and INSTALL files contained with in.