I think the driver for your ethernet card wont be a problem the Linux kernel already has compiled in drivers I think. The next thing you'll have to do is bring up the ethernet interface and attribute an ip using ifconfig and adding a route for your local net using the route command etc. I think the following tutorial will help you a lot on that: http://www.tldp.org/LDP/nag/node1.html
This tutorial will help you getting all the basic knowledge and much more about networking on linux including making gateways for other pcs to access the internet.
I hope this helps you

Thanks whisper!

I am certainly hoping the driver wont be a problem. lspci currently doesn't show anything about ethernet though, but I'm guessing my ethernet chip should be via-rhine or in the worst case realtek. I found the kernel module for via-rhine so I suppose that shouldn't be a problem. I'm not sure about realtek though.

I'm going to BIOS to check if everything is set there just in case.

I'll check that tldp manual out.

Ok good news is that I indeed have via-rhine. It was just disabled in BIOS so it wasn't showing on lspci. I enabled it now and it is there:

Good! That tutorial I mentioned it's very extensive so I better give you a shortcut to the part that "matters" (everything matters ): http://www.tldp.org/LDP/nag/node58.html#SECTION007000000 . But anyway I advise you to read from the begining of the tutorial because it introduces you to the basic concepts of ip networking if you don't have them. Good Luck

Thanks. I'll probably go through all that to fine tune the LAN. For now I've found a quick guide here http://www.linuxquestions.org/linux/answers/Networking/Newbies_Guide_to_Small_Home_LAN and managed to set up a working host on my (first) computer with an IP address and a hostname. When I ping daniel.libernode.com which I've assigned as my hostname currently it actually pings the localhost, which is actually the way its supposed to be so I assume it's alright.

And this is what route -n shows:

The dvb inerfaces are for my SatADSL connection, from before (it's my download connection I use through a proxy). The eth0 is there too and shows an IP address of 192.169.10.0 as destination although the local address I set to this computer was 192.169.10.1 so I assume that it has automatically set the expected connection of the other computer as 192.169.10.0 or something..

Oh well I'll look through that tutorial you linked to figure it out.

Thanks

The 192.169.10.0 ip number isn't the ip number of your ehternet interface but rather the route of your local network, it allows ip to know where to send the ip datagrams that belong to your network, it is the path to the rest of the computers in your local network. It is this number that defines your network virtually.
Note that I could be wrong on any concept i mentioned because I'm also a noob at this area so read the
ip routing chapter on the tutorial I linked and All your doubts will be enlightned , but again i advise you to read it from the begining.
I should start reading this tutorial too bacause I never had the conditions to read it decently

I see..

For the sake of better differentiating I've changed the eth0 IP to 192.170.0.1 and the destination in the routing table was hence 192.170.0.0.

So I suppose that 192.170.0.0 is the IP address of my network as a whole, 192.170.0.1 is the IP address of my first host as reachable through eth0 and once I assign it on the second host (sisters computer) the 192.170.0.2 will be the address of the second host as reachable through eth0 that is running there.

So the kernel looks to 192.170.0.0 to deal with the network and then sends data back and forth between 192.170.0.1 and 192.170.0.2 and I can then ping each other from each computer, right?

So to set up the basic connection (ability to ping back and forth at the least) the only thing necessary is to do this on both computers:

ifconfig eth0 192.170.0.x

And of course for both computers I can set a hostnamee which is already there anyway... Correct me if I'm wrong..

Well I'll be checking that now anyway.

yep You're right. That's it! But you also have to add the route everytime you set a network using the route command. In your case would be : route add -net 192.170.0.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 If your machine didn't already do that for you.

Cool. I verfied it too. I pinged the other box succesfully and just to make sure even disconnected the cable to see if anything would change and indeed I couldn't ping it then, so that's it. The basics are set.

Now I just need to set up internet connection sharing. I suppose that I need to create a route between eth0 and ppp0 so that they can use ppp0. My set up is a bit more complex though as I also have a proxy for SatADSL download so I need to make that available to the other computer through eth0 as well. Gonna have to explore the manual to set that up.

Thanks alot for the help so far whisper!

To give a internet access to you sisters' computer you'll have to add a default route wich will send any datagrams from you sister computer that dont belong to your network to the gateway (which is your computer) through eth0 and then your computer will send that datagrams through ppp0. You'll have to specify to route that the route your adding it's a default route. But read the tutorial, It explains this stuff better than I By the way, this time the route must be pointing to a machine and not a net

I see..

I'll read that tutorial more extensively now.

So far I can only send pings. Still can't ssh from sisters computer to mine or access a web server I started on it.

Maybe ssh server/client isn't configured yet... can't figure out that because I don't know much about that stuff . I hope you can fix that.
Good Luck

No problem, I'll figure it out.

Thank you

I found out why I couldn't connect to ssh and http on my first computer. I misapplied the IP address on the second computer.

Also, after being suggested by a guy from IRC to use iptables for sharing an internet connection over ppp0 I found this page: http://www.linuxsolved.com/forums/ftopic115.html

It instructs making a nice script that sets up a NAT with iptables forwarding traffic from ppp0 to eth0. After setting that up it works now.

Now the tricky part is that ppp0 only represents my EDGE connection which is charged per MB and is hence expensive for anything more than upload. I use my SatADSL connection through a proxy for download stuff and would like to apply that proxy to eth0 as well. My sisters will probably want to download some stuff when I'm not using the connection so this could be great to set up.

I'm looking into iptables proxying for that...

I was searching and trying for hours and I couldn't find out how to wrap up my eth0 connection on my proxy. I experimented a bit with IP tables modifying existing lines that deal with proxying, but nothing.

I was then thinking that if proxy server is located under a 9202 port on the localhost of the first computer then I can just enter its IP/port to firefox and it could work, but it didn't. It needed those special dvb0 interfaces. I even tried forwarding them too through eth0, but only ended up with proxy timeouts do to inability to communicate.

Now I'm not sure anymore what else to try. I just want the other computer which is sharing this computer's internet connection to share in its proxy redirecting download through SatADSL instead of ordinary ppp0. There *must* be a way to achieve that.

I've managed to set all this up. Sisters computer now has access to the same internet connection as this one and all is cool. We also share one folder (a whole partition actually) from my computer as read only on theirs so whatever interesting I may download there it will be available to them. And through ssh and sshfs I have access to their whole computer as their admin, though I've set up a user for myself there as well.

The way I did connection sharing is by doing a NAT masquerade as it seems to be called. I "masqueraded" all interfaces used for my full connection (proxy redirects download through a special dvb interface) and then forwarded them to eth0. To use the proxy they have exactly the same setup as I do, just insert the proxy info in firefox and other net and proxy aware applications and that's it, the download will go over SatADSL. For programs which don't support proxying we wrap them in tsocks which overrides their connection replacing it with the one that goes over proxy.

Thanks for all the help again whisper!

I'm glad we had this conversation . Since I'm no expert at this area there were many concepts i didn't have yet and I needed to clear some doubts i had about networking like this one of ip masquerading (and others) which this conversation put on the surface so I also have to thank you for that.

Thank you for the enlightment libervisco!

Hehe that's cool.