[CLUE-Tech] almost there with Debian

[Roger Frank]

Since a recent CLUE meeting, I've been spending some
time investigating Debian.  With Mandrake, it's all smooth
and it just works, but I don't learn much about what's
under the hood.  With Debian, it's not smooth and it
doesn't just work, probably because of my ignorance.
When I find out how to do something in Debian, it makes
sense and I feel more in control.  I like that.  But finding
out how to do something can be hard, even with
on-line resources.

For example, I want my Debian machine to participate
on a network.I figured out to create a file /etc/modutils/network
and put "alias eth0 3c59x" in it.  Rebooting and it finds the
Ethernet card just fine.  But ping still gives me "network
is unreachable".  I can manually start it with
'ifconfig eth0 192.168.1.9 netmask 255.255.255.0 up'
and then everything is fine.  But I don't know where to
put the ifconfig command in the startup scripts so I don't
have to type it in.  I'm sure this is simple, but I can't
figure it out.  I did a grep for ifconfig in /etc and its
subdirectories and it's not in any scripts.

I think I would like Debian if it didn't make me feel so
technically inadequate.

-- 
Roger Frank
Ponderosa High School, Colorado