Setting up a small home network

[maxstradamus]

crossover cable: check
dell latitude d620 notebook: check
main PC with FC5 and net hook up: check

Can someone point me in the right direction to get these two machines on one network with shared net connection and some shared folders?
Keep in mind that i'm a noob so the easier words you use, the better chance of pulling this throught i'll have :)

[jcliburn]

Define "net". Do you mean Internet, or do you just want these machines to talk to each other in isolation? If you want them to connect to the Internet, the easiest thing to do is buy a 5-port 10/100 switch, plug your ISP router into one port and each of your two computers into two of the remaining ports. (Use straight-through cables, not crossover.) After doing that, post back here if you have trouble configuring the machines, but usually your ISP provides some instructions, albeit Windows-centric, but the same concepts apply. Each computer needs to be assigned an IP address, and you need to supply each computer with the same gateway address (which would be the address of your router).

[maxstradamus]

Yes, by net i mean internet. And what I'm trying to do is connect my laptop to my PC (which has 2 NICs) and be able to access internet on my laptop as well as some shared files/folders between both machines. It's very simply done under XP and I didn't think it would require extra hardware to get it to work under FC5.

Are you sure there's no other way?
Regards

[jcliburn]

You can certainly do it in FC5. But the *easiest* way to get both connected is to buy a cheap switch. The next easiest way is to let XP share its connection with FC5 (but alas, you have but one ethernet connection in your laptop). The least easiest way to do it, but still eminently doable, is to connect one FC5 NIC to your router and the other to your laptop (with the xc cable). You'll have to enable IP forwarding and you'll have to assign a different subnet to the NICs. My guess is you'll assign eth0 to be 192.168.0.2 (or something else like 192.168.0.x that matches your router network, assuming the router is at 192.168.0.1) and assign its gateway address to be the address of your router. Then you'll set up eth1 to be 192.168.1.1, with its gateway to be 192.168.0.2. On your laptop, you'll assign its Local Area Network connection to 192.168.1.2, with a default gateway of 192.168.1.1.

All this is predicated upon the address of your router, though. Search the "howto" forums for guides on setting up a network; it should be there.