First off, I want to thank jschiwal. I changed the choice of driver to vesa, and was able to use Gnome; looked just fine.
I now am faced with the problem of configuring my NIC. During POST, it tries to bring up the (PCI) network card eth0; it then claims 127.255.255.255 ... it doesn't seem to see the LAN connection although I am sure that the card is seated properly, and the cable is connected securely.
My situation is this. I have this computer connected to a router (shares my cable-modem connection with my other computer running WindowsXP-home), and also connects it to a printer (hp6127). This setup worked on my old 'puter, running RH9, so I need to find out what to do for Mandrake. Thanks in advance. TudeCat

in theory you should be able to open the mandrake control centre and look into the network and connections and either find a "manage your connections" or "new connection" icon and then just follow the wizard.

Having just checked I get 127.0.0.1 and 255.0.0.0 for the "local loopback".

Whereas the eth0 show the local IP, broadcast and mask properly.

so presuming that you've got things set up as normal i.e. not using dhcp etc just a standard LAN connection using eth0

You should be able to su to your root account (plus the root password if you've got one), the just type

ifconfig eth0

and that should show you what you've got eth0 configured as i.e. to make sure you've got the correct IP configured to talk to the router. In fact that should tell you (along with the instructions for the router) what the normal range of internal IP address's the router is using and the screen info should tell you what you've got it set as.

e.g. my router modem can use like 10.0.0.1 to 10.0.0.255, 192.168.7.1 to 192.168.7 255 etc etc but I'd have to make sure the IP that I use for the LAN/eth0 would be 10.0.0.2 (the 10.0.0.1 being the default gateway).

Is that what you were asking ???

regards

John

Hello back,
I am trying to be able to see the LAN that my new puter is conntected to. After not getting any useful help from the router company, I used the GUI tool, and chose the wizard. It saw my NIC, and reported back to me that it configured my eth0, and had me reboot.
I now got the following information on using ifconfig:
eth0 Link encap. Ethernet
HWaddr 00:0D:88:22:11:F0
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST: MTU 1500 Metric:1
Rxpackets: 0 errors: 0 dropped: 0 overruns 0 frame: 0
txpackets: 12 errors: 0 dropped: 0 overruns: 0 carrier:0
collisions: 0 txquelen: 100

eth0:9 Link encap: Ethernet
HW addr 00:0D:88:22:11:F0
inet addr 127.255.255.255
broadcast: 127.255.255.255
Mask 255.0.0.0
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST: MTU 1500 Metric:1
Interrupt: 19 base adress 0x8c00

lo Link encap: local loopback
inet addr 127.0.0.1
mask 255.0.0.0
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU 16436 Metric 1
Rx packets 3500 dropped: 0 overruns 0 frame: 0
Tx packsets: 350 dropped: 0 overruns: 0 carrier: 0
collisions: 0 txquelen: 0
Rx bytes: 34277 (33.4 kb) Tx bytes: 34277 (33.4 kb)

OK, now what do I do next; do I use the GUI config tool to use Share your internet connection? I don't want to do anything on the Linux that might cause a problem with my other 'puter ... but I want to be able to get online with the Linux. Please advise, thanks. TudeCat