Basically the two main types of distros are Debian and RHEL/Centos based. I'm just going to give a quick overview of how the configuration of IP interfaces works in Debian/Centos based distros.
*Just one thing to remember, when setting IPs statically you have to manually specify a DNS server in /etc/resolv.conf (since DHCP is what normally does it automatically)
Debian/Ubuntu/Kubuntu/MEPIS
The IP (DHCP &........