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 &........