cable modem installation woes

[jeffwass at MIT.EDU (Wass)]

Greetings everybody,

	I'm a relative linux newbie, though I've been using various unices
for the past 5 years.  All this administration stuff is new to me.  I just
started receiving RCN's cable modem service.  Everything works fine under
windows 98, but I'm having many troubles configuring it for linux.
	Here's my situation.  I'm running RedHat 5.2 with the default
kernel (2.0.36 i think).  My ethernet card is an Acer ALN-320.  The disk
included with the card had drivers for many OS's, including SCO (but not
linux).  First off - how can I find out if drivers for this card exist
somewhere for linux?
	RCN's cable service uses DHCP.  Searching at RedHat's site 
for DHCP brought up a mini HOWTO about configuring the client-side
daemon (dhcpcd).  According to the howto, one goes to the network 
setting in the control-panel, add's a new interface (ethernet), 
and sets it to configure at boot time.  The next steps say that after
bootup ifconfig should list the eth0 device and either a valid ethernet
address, or an invalid one (ie, 0.0.0.0).  Okay, I did the install
through control-panel, and via control-panel's window (using FVWM2)
I can see the eth0 device.  However, upon reboot, the bootup script
says it is delaying initialization of eth0.  Okay, then when I login
I type "ifconfig" and it only lists the lo device.  Going back into
control panel, the eth0 device is listed with the network interfaces,
and is 'inactive'.  Clicking activate makes the window say it is 'active'
but exiting and reloading control-panel the eth0 device is once again
inactive.  even when it is supposedly active, ifconfig still doesn't
acknowledge the eth0 device.
	Is there something utterly wrong here, either with my system
or my understanding of what should be going on?  there are a few other
steps that need to be taken after this, such as redoing a script or two
to not make the DHCP request think it failed (i think).  I also changed
these scripts, and still no response.
	One other quirk - the HOWTO, which was taken from redhat's site,
said the dhcpcd daemon could be manually started by executing
/usr/sbin/dhcpcd.  In /usr/sbin the only dhcp program is dhcpd, which
i think is the server daemon.  My dhcpcd client daemon resides in
/sbin/dhcpcd.  Is this normal as well?
	Thanks to any help that can be offered.  Please note I receive
BLU mail in digest form, so it will be a while before I can read any
responses sent back to the listserv. 

	- wass
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