Cable connection is up and running! -- thanks to Cory and Kahli who gave me enough pointers, and also picked up on issues in my original description that indicated some trouble spot.
Reason --and what to learn: None on the dhcp clients from my initial mdk 8.1 installation was working properly. I reinstalled all clients that were available in the package and then the first 'ifup eth0' found a dhcp server w/o problem (still not knowing which dhcp client was called, but that is now secondary) Actually, the fast failure, as described in my earlier message > ....) I was not able to get configured as DHCP > client (it fails pretty fast w/o long search). will be indicative the next time I run into such a problem. Secondly, Kahli you were right, I did introduce a typo in my IP that propagated through bash-TAB expansion and clip&paste into my gateway address (should be 12.225.128.1) and also into ping. ... shame on me -- but I do admit :-( After correcting this I was also able to set things up manually, w/o dhcp, just to practice a bit. -- Horst.
