connecting two machines with a router, no internet connection

Hi, As the info below will show, I know nothing at all about networking and, until last week, never needed to. I have a simple router which worked fine when connecting two PCs running XPpro. Now I'm trying to use it to connect two workstations, each running SuSE 10.0 (one 32- and one 64-bit), but there is no connection to the internet or to any isp. (Yes, I know I could do this with a crossover cable, but I shall intermittently have network connection soon.) I tried assigning one machine a local address of 10.0.0.1, making it the dhcp server, but no joy. There seems to be no way to use Yast to create the connection that I want. Any suggestions? jim bennett