I need help. I have a cable modem. It has an USB out. I didn't want to buy a router. So I hooked my WinXP computer up to the cable modem by USB. I wanted to network my Linux computer to the WinXp computer by the ethernet cards in each. The only problem is, I don't know what I need to know to do this. I've never setup a network like this. And I don't know what things mean like subnet mask, gateway, netmask, etc... I know how to go in and manually change things. But I don't know what I need to change. I think I may need to reboot my Linux computer for the changes to take effect.

I rebooted my machine and nothing. I believe there's something wrong with the config in WinXP because, the green light on the ethernet card on the linux machine comes on when I plug the cable modem into it. So I know it wants to receive data but the Windows Machine just isn't sending anything.

What do I need to do to get these computers talking to each other?