Eh... that's just great. Yes, the computer has a built-in ethernet card.
Do you have wireless-tools installed? Type iwconfig and see what devices you get listed. If these are USB cards make sure USB is started (ehci_hcd, uhci_hcd, ohci_hcd, usbcore).
I've used `iwconfig` and gotten "No wireless extensions" for lo, eth0 and eth1.
I vaguely recall seeing Gentoo attempting to coldplug USB, but it's worth a shot. Is that list commands I should execute?
feyd wrote:I've been trying out a bunch of different flavors recently.. Ubuntu and it's siblings (Kubuntu and Xubuntu) were all the easiest to get up and running, not to mention updating the installs that come with them. FreeBSD took the longest to install and was just "not quite right" once I got it installed, Fedora Core 5 continually failed to install due to a bug in the installer. Gentoo was a similar experience to Fedora, but easier to deal with (it did actually install.) Compilation failed several times due to oddities in the installer. So, I can only recommend Ubuntu and siblings. I've installed it on my local server.
FreeBSD didn't take long to install for me (6.0). In fact I think it didn't even take as long as my FC4 & 5 installations. But all of them were rather quick (compared to windows installations anyways (vista beta 2 took foreverrrr)).
I've also been playing around with distros. Out of all the ones I've tried, I personally found FC5 to be the most appealing to install. Anaconda is sweet! I also had an issue with the installer, and I googled it and surpassed the "bug" by typing a garbage string before choosing which type of install to do.
Set Search Time - A google chrome extension. When you search only results from the past year (or set time period) are displayed. Helps tremendously when using new technologies to avoid outdated results.
I'd go for Kubuntu (I favor KDE). If you want a solid distro that comes "pre-configured" with the basic stuff (browser plugins, and a lot of other PITA stuff all set up try MEPIS).
I had no problems with the FC 5 installer. Although I recently hosed FC 5 for Kubuntu. The details are on my site. I can't stand how slow RPM's are compared to APT. I know you can install RPM-APT. I tried that too. I found synaptic a bit buggy and untrustworthy compared to YUMEX.