linux laptop

ok heres my situation, ive been dabeling in linux for..... some time now, on and off... keeping windows arround so i could use my nice little peice of **** winmodem, so any way, you know how usefull windows is at connecting everything for you, well so my problem comes in my NIC. its a PCMCIA D-Link, my SuSE picks it up as there but im not sure that its.... letting the rest of the system use it. i know its probly something with telling it that its my network device (which i dont know how to do eactly) and its not even letting me ping the other puters on my parents LAN (step dad is a M$ freek so hes got an XP Pro home network sining b/t his and my moms puter) ok so i also wanna know, once i get the NIC running and i can atleast see there puters, how (if) can i use his shared internet connection. yes i read the tutorial about sharing internet connections but it only covers M$ clients on a *nix LAN, not a linux client on a M$ LAN...

any help, cause im really running out of ideas.... who knows, mabee (not that i expect it in the slightest way anyway) once i get the NIC configured right itll just pick it up.....

what is the IP address and subnet mask of your stepdad's computer with the internet connection?
what is the IP address and subnet mask is your laptop?
if they are in the same subnet, try setting your stepdad's computer as the gateway for your laptop to use, the command is something like this from the console:
$ route add default gw <GATEWAY IP ADDRESS>
then add the domain servers that the gateway uses to your own laptop, the file is called /etc/resolv.conf.
hopefully win xp will allow you to use it just like that.

ok, writing in from my laptop.... i feel like an idiot. i just used the YaST2 auto setup to get up the nic and manualy configured the gateway (thats what they do..... :) thats alot

ummm... does that mean it works? is YaST2 gui-based?

regards,
mark.

YaST2 = Yet another Setup Tool...or some crap like that. Makes configuration real simple. I think it is gui, but I personally haven't used it, so.....

you can run yast from the shell or from GUI. I have used I when I was telneted in a friends box once. There is a textbased version and a GUI based version of it.