Quote Originally Posted by karo
....Here are some very basic q's: I want to connect to the internet via LAN (works with XP) in my dormitory......
We don't know how your dorm is set up so this is a tricky question to answer (actually, tricky to answer properly, you'll likely get lots of answers). If your dorm uses DHCP to assign IP addresses and such to devices on the network, then you might just connect when you boot if you are plugged into the network at that time. If the "network team" manually provides you with the IP address and other information, but for some reason does not have DHCP running to assign it, then try running netcardconfig and manually filling in the information. You mention a user and password, but in the way that you said it I got the impression that this was only for the news server (although it likely should be for a mail server too). If you need the password to get on the network itself then there is more we need to know about (are you running any special software on the Xp system?) but if not then I expect Netcardconfig will be all that ou need, if even that.

A few more thoughts. I'm very impressed by the capabilities that the small inexpensive dsl/cable routers add to a network, and I would certainly consider adding one to your dorm setup. It should be able to either acept DHCP configuration or manually be configured to connect to the network (unless there's some XP only software involved for login), and then your Knoppix and/or Xp systems would connect to that with no setup needed on them at all. And it would give you an extra level of hardware firewall, an important consideration in a dorm. And don't trust your news server or e-mail passwords to be secure in the system as you described it, someone in that dorm may well be watching.