Gill, Jack wrote:
> Is the LiveCD supposed to open an internet connection?  Ubuntu does on
> this machine, but SL doesn't.  
>
yes, it should - if not, try to configure the network with:

# system-config-network

If this still does not work, SL5 may not support your network device. In 
order to debug this, I would need the output of

# /sbin/lspci
# /sbin/lsmod

You can run these commands also on Ubuntu.

Cheers,

    Urs