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I get two distinct errors when trying to install new drivers for my
ethernet and graphics card.

1. Ethernet:
The driver is in a tar gziped file, which is not the dependency method
primarily supported by my version of Linux (Mandrake). Nonetheless,
everything works up until the time when I try to make the driver.
Linux comes up with an error that says something to the effect of:

'You should not reference files in usr/src/linux/include. Instead use
the files in /home/[user name -r]/build/inlude.'

The specific header file that is returning the error text is
version.h. The error message also tells me to edit the makefile, but
I am only a second semester CS student who is learning Java as a first
language. I have no idea what to do about the makefile. Even after I
edited the line number that the error gave me, the problem was still
the same.

The driver I am attempting to install is for 3Com's 940 onboard
gigabit ethernet. I got the driver from Asus' website (they are the
maker of my graphics board). Additionally, the readme for the driver
suggests that I should have kernel version 2.4. How do I find out
what kernel version I have? How can I update it without a connection
to the internet?

2. Graphics:
I have a ATI Radeon 9800 XT. I downloaded the driver from ATI's
website. It is in the rpm format, which Mandrake uses. When I
double-clicked it, it opened the install wizard as it was supposed to.
However, it stopped and came up with the error message "foo.bar from
<driver file name> causes a conflict with ." That's right, it's just
blank, it doesn't say what the conflict is with. Not that I'd know
what to do about it even if it wasn't.

I don't really care about my graphics problems that much. I'm not
planning to run any games on Linux, that's what my XP partition is
for. However, I can't do any development if I can't connect to the
internet and download the files I need (that had been my original plan
for getting linux: to make development more simple and to get used to
it so that when I entered the professional world, I would be good to
go).