Q I have loaded Mandrake 9.2 on to a second hard drive (with Windows ME running on the other) and have bought an Ethernet card to run my NTL broadband connection. Broadband runs fine on Windows now, but how do I get it running on Mandrake? Someone suggested I run 'ifconfig' but I don't know what all this DHCP stuff is. I can get 'configure network cards' up in Mandrake's configure but what do I do from here? If you can help I would be really grateful.
A Cable modems generally work via DHCP, so you can simply configure the Ethernet interface in Mandrake to obtain the address automatically from the network and let it work everything out. You can also test it from the command line using the 'dhcpcd' utility, which will request a DHCP lease from the NTL server and allow you to access the internet. Using 'ifconfig' is only really helpful if you have a static IP assignment, for example, on an internal network, so DHCP is the way to go with cable and DSL services.