Most linux distrobutions come with a DHCP client called dhclient. You should be able to type dhclient <ethernet interface> and it will try to recieve a DHCP address from the 'DHCP Server'. The other issue you might have is if you installed a DHCP server on this machine as well then you will have conflicting DHCP servers, which might cause network issues for the entire network.

If the IP you found the system assigned to itself was in the 169.254.x.x range, that means that your box could not connect to the DHCP server. Linux, Windows, and Mac boxen will all default to that range if unable to obtain a valid IP via DHCP.

You definitely do need to have a DHCP client running, and as already mentioned, if you accidentally installed and ran a DCHP server on the Linux box you'll have conflicts.

dhclient, dhcpcd, and pump are the three most-used DHCP client programs. You can see if you have one of them running by opening a terminal window and typing the following two commands:

ps ax |grep dhc
ps ax |grep pump

Also, posting the exact text of the "could not join..." error would be of great help. You can view your bootup message/error log with the following command; anything helpful in there?:

dmesg |less

Thank you very much for the replies. Due to other reasons as well, I am reinstalling, will see what happens next.

It sure is a steep learning curve.

Don't sweat it- any operating system is a steep learning curve if it's not not the one you're used to using.

A shameless plug that will help you if you want to learn Linux:

Both Alex (alc6379) and I moderate a very good Linux-oriented tech support site at www.justlinux.com. Check out the site and register as a member; we've got a lot of very knowledgeable members over there who are more than willing to help you make the "learning curve" less steep.

Thank you.

I might have to mention what Im trying to do right now, and why Linux got into the picture.

Sans the internet and email servers, we're basically a Windows shop. I am currently researching how to implement Windows Terminal Services having Linux as clients. Our major applications are running on Windows, thats why for now, Windows is here to stay.

Thanks!

Having linux clients to a terminal server is easy!

http://www.rdesktop.org/
http://www.nongnu.org/grdesktop/

And somewhere on Citrix's site they provide a linux Citrix client as well.