mandrake networking and also lfs

[Keith Antoine]

I always manage to find problems where they should not exist, as you all well 
know. I have two differing problems one with Mandrake 10 and one with LFS, 
but i'll ask re the mandrake one first.

Initially I had problems with the install and boot of Mandrake 10 only to 
discover that I had a bad motherboard, the a bad video card and lastly
mismatched ram timings. The motherboard was brand new and took two weeks to 
find that it was at fault, then the video card was found to be faulty and 
lastly the Corasir extreme ram modules were not matching in timing. It was 
hard because XP would run on them but the two tv cards would not co-exist and 
I got random reboots. Where I could not install and boot linux at all.

So just last weekend i finally got everything sorted out and replaced under 
warranty. Now uner XP all is fine but Mandrake still has one problem. It 
installs and bootsup I have sound and printer plus correct video now however 
the cable fails on install. I have found that i can su to 
the /usr/bin/drake.real gui interface and call the network & internet module. 
At this point I can make a new connection by using the interface, cable dhcp.
after it has finished I can get out on the net, but it is lost on the reboot. 
It seems to me that the command is only for that session and is not being 
written permenantly.

Dmesg has this entry:
forcedeth.c: Reverse Engineered nForce ethernet driver. Version 0.23.
PCI: Setting latency timer of device 0000:00:04.0 to 64
eth0: forcedeth.c: subsystem: 01043:80a7 bound to 0000:00:04.0
eth0: no IPv6 routers present
Disabled Privacy Extensions on device c03a1020(lo)
eth0: no IPv6 routers present

What can I do via command line to enable cable on boot.

LFS:
I am a bit frustrated with the distro offerings and have decided to give lfs a 
try, but missed something somewhere that is stopping me issuing commands, 
something simple. It has to be with permissions but what it is exactly ????
Made a dir in /mnt called lfs
set the variable with:: export LFS=/MNT?lfs
did an echo $lfs, return is lfs

I set up the .bash_profile and also 
cat > ~/.bashrc << "EOF"
set +h
umask 022
LFS=/mnt/lfs
LC_ALL=POSIX
PATH=/tools/bin:/bin:/usr/bin
export LFS LC_ALL PATH
EOF

I downloaded the sources and placed the in a dir /lfs/sources also 
made /lfs/tools. I cannot do a :: mkdir ../binutils-build as i am told i do 
not have the proper permissions, yet I login with 'su - lfs and type in the 
passsword "lfs' which was set previously. I am supposed to be in an 
environment seperated from Mandrake which I am using piggy back, I have 
checked all the docs but am still stymied.

I have as yet been unable to start constructing the temporary system.

Any help would be greatly appreciated as always.

Skippy (must make a signature)