[LennonCook]

Originally posted by andrewas: Don't dell use a proprietary netword card? If so, life is about to get a little tricky, though you should be able to find a fairly complete guide somewhere.

The Optiplex might be different, but my Inspiron has always worked well for networking, and I've had... *counts*... Ubuntu twice, Gentoo once, and Linux From Scratch twice.

Jarrad: Possibly look around in /etc (or if you prefer, the various config utilities) for anything to do with networking. If you can't even get internet, it is most likely either your network card not working (unlikely in a 'Just Works' distro like Fedora Core or Ubuntu), or it giving you a static IP when you want DHCP (or the other way around).
EDIT: Also try installing Samba (might already be in), and running 'smbtree'. It should give you a list of all the Windows shares on the network. But I have doubts that that will work before internet is.

[ 10-02-2005, 09:03 PM: Message edited by: LennonCook ]