Getting the wired Internet connection to work on the dv2945se

The problem is that I'm on a network that uses DHCP, but I haven't told the computer to get itself a new IP address. This probably wouldn't have been a problem if either (a) I'd plugged in the ethernet cord during install or (b) this laptop had a network card that Slackware can configure.  No matter; it's easy to fix:

su -c ifconfig

One of the first lines it gave in response was:

eth0 Link encap: Ethernet HWaddr 01:2A:34:56:7B:8C

The point here is that it says "Link encap: Ethernet", and the name given is "eth0." If yours says something different than eth0, use that instead in the commands below.

su -c "dhcpcd eth0"

The quotes tell the computer that I mean for it to run both words as one command as root. Note that if I forget the last ", it will give a mostly blank line. Hit ctrl-c to cancel out of it if that happens.

Now to see if that worked.

lynx

And... success!

Time check...
Elapsed time interacting: 1 minute
Total time interacting: 4 minutes
Total time waiting: 0 minutes