“The hardest part of getting your machine set up for
Ethernet would probably be getting the card detected in the first
place. You’ll probably have to enable support for your network
card by checking with your kernel configuration, or, more
conveniently, recompiling your kernel with support for your
Ethernet card enabled, as well as other stuff you might need in
compiling your kernel…”
“Once the card is detected, you have stuff to do. The first
step, I think, would be to assign an IP address (a series of 4
numbers separated by dots representing a host or a group of hosts)
to your machine. Let’s just say that you’re going to assign the
address 192.168.0.1 to your machine…”
“I worried about issues like how the card would contact the hub
(because I use RJ-45 cabling–you know, the kind that has
connectors that look like giant phone jacks) before I tried setting
up Ethernet for the first time. At first I tried to use Red Hat’s
netcfg tool that came bundled with the rest of the distribution;
that got my IP address assigned to me correctly, but I couldn’t get
a ping from my sister’s computer, a Windows 95 machine.”