Networking can range from two computers with a direct connection to each other to the many computers at General Motors linked with each other through a variety of methods. Connecting to other computers is wonderful, but even the setup of a simple PPP connection to an Internet Service Provider can be frustrating. In one chapter, all of the aspects of networking with Debian can't be addressed. There are many books available about networking in addition to information on the Internet. The focus here will be to complete a workstation Ethernet and/or PPP dial-up connection.
Linux provides a variety of networking methods such as Ethernet, SLIP, PPP, Arc-net and Apple-talk. The setup of these will be left as a challenging exercise to the reader. In either case there are a host of other sources for information on this subject. Once a standard Debian system has been installed, there is a complete set of FAQs and HOW-TOs in the directory, /usr/doc. A good starting point would be the NET-2-HOWTO.gz file found in /usr/doc/HOWTO. This document has a very good bibliography in the beginning, pointing to a wide variety of related HOWTOs that are very useful in understanding the situation.
Many of these documents are available in HTML format on the Internet. For instance the Ethernet-HOWTO is available at:
http://sunsite.unc.edu/mdw/HOWTO/Ethernet-HOWTO.html
or you can browse the index at:
http://sunsite.unc.edu/mdw/HOWTO/HOWTO-INDEX-3.html
The details that can be found there may be helpful in making use of the information that will be discussed in the following section.