Hi, Okay. After 128 minutes the guy at Suse (who sounded a bit newbie-ish) discovered that while making the installation I had left my Compex Ready Link PCMCIA ethernet card in the socket. The machine saw the PCMCIA card AND the internal Accton Technologies card that came with the HP notebook. The system apparently became confused. We took out the PCMCIA card, rebooted, and when I go into hardward info in Yast2 (he didn't want me to use command line entries) I get (and it seems to me that only the last bit, about drivers, is pertinent but I copied the whole shebang here for clarity and in the likely possibility that I'm missing something): EN01216 Ethernet Adapter Bus: PCI Clas (Spec) : ethernet Controller Class: network controller Device EN 1216 Ethernet Adapter Device identifier *spec) 74306 DEEvice identifier 70166 Resources: io 0x1x00 Active: yes length:0 more: rw start 7168 irq 11 count: 0 enabled: yes irq:11 mem: 0xe8000000 active: yes start 3892314112 rev: 17 Sub Vendor: Accton Technology Corp Sub Vendor Identifier: 69907 Unique Key: blah blah blah Drivers: Modules Active: No Modprobe: Yes Modules Modprobe tulip SO. The nice Suse man told me that because the module is not active, I should........ REINSTALL SUSE 8.0 without the PCMCIA card in place. Then, he hopes, Suse will identify only the internal ethernet chip and properly install the driver for it. I asked whether it was simply possible for me to reinstall the driver and he said, Maybe, but since it's a virgin install and you won't lose any data the best thign is to reinstall. I suspect his advice was given for expediency only because the suse supervisor was standing over his shoulder and complaining that the average call time is 20 minutes, and we'd been on for two hours. Can anyone offer any comment or suggestions? Thanks in advance, nick