Make a tar @#$*

Installing Drivers can be a major headache for newbies and GUI enthusiasts. In my case, since the achilles heel of most distros seemed to be improper drivers for the LAN card, I headed to the Realtek site. The drivers were there, but in the most unfreindly format - source code.
Source code needs to be compiled before it can be installed. And while this ensure maximum compatibility with the hardware, it also means relying on the console throughout the process.

I tried this in Mandriva and Opensuse, and in both cases stumbled in the second step of the installation process mentioned in the readme file that accompanies the driver.

The tar command can be used to open th gz/bz2 compressed packages. Or it is just much easier to use the usual GUI option to extract the archive. The result is the same.
After extraction, the source needs to be compiled, and the steps to do this is present in the readme that is available after extracting the archive.
"make clean modules" is the first command to be used, according to the readme. This promptly returns an error - make command not found. The make command will be available after installing the make package. So I loaded the application manager and did that. With make available, I reentered the command. This time the error related to the absence of a gcc file. Another visit to the application manager and the gcc packages was installed. Retrying the command not produces numerous errors, all relating to missing files.
gcc is just one of the many C language package available. There are other options titled gcc 3, gcc 4 etc which refer to the version of the package. With no advice on which version was needed, I did not venture to install any further package.

The solution or rather shunt, involved using a discrete lan card with a chip whose driver was already in the distro. So I extracted the Lan card from an older system, and was quickly online.

I needs to be mentioned that none of the distros indicate that lack of driver is the problem. All of them, during the configuration stage continue as normal, but accessing the net is impossible. Opensuse during the installation also identifies correctly the chip - realtek pcie gigabit - but still when trying to go online I get "no connection" errors. This is strange.
While an older LAN card solved the net access problem the fact that Realtek did not offer a precompiled or binary version of the driver is worth considering. This is undoubtedly one of the negative effects of the multiple distros, offering a single source file beats having to offer over a dozen binary versions since each distro has projected its own package manager. This approach is suicidal, for the Linux movemen, of course.

Probably the motherboard manufacturer has the relevant drivers on the site, which is where I should have gone first.