GNU/Linux Desktop Survival Guide by Graham Williams |
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Networks |
The network provides access to a wide collection of resources. Most computers today connect to the network either through an Ethernet network card or else by modem. Once connected you have an IP address (and sometimes more than one) assigned to your computer by which all communications is effected. IP addresses are sequences of numbers.
Two things need to happen to get your network going: loading a driver for your network card and specifying your network address and configuration.
An Ethernet based network is usually started up at boot time by the system initialisation script /etc/init.d/networking. For pcmcia network cards the /etc/pcmcia/ tree provides its own scrips, including /etc/pcmcia/network, that is called whenever a network card is found in the PCMCIA socket.