Can't I just plug in the ethernet and go?

I thought imacs were easy. I've been reading on here about these people have problems connecting to the internet, and when I read on the set-up pages, it's like you have to have a lot of information (dns, isp, etc...) to put in. It kind of seems complicated. I was hoping it would work with any pc I've ever had; I would just plug the ethernet cable running from my linksys wrt54g version 2.0 which is hooked up to my cable modem. And it would just work. Tell me these are random cases of people having problems and I can just plug in my ethernet and it will work and maybe even detect the wireless connection on its own. Which I'll run it wired because I have the cables and it's not a problem to. Shine some light on me. - Thanks.

It's almost always plug-and play for wired ethernet. That is to say, most people use a router that has DHCP which will permit your machine to automatically configure itself. With wireless it may be a little more complicated in that you need to know the name of the router you want to connect too (they have names because there could be several in the area) and what encryption method and key is used (because you're transmitting over radio, so no encryption would mean anyone close enough can listen in).
However, even when you use a wired network, there are times where you're going to want to not have the machine automatically use setting provided by the router but rather specify your own. For example, if you want to access services on your Mac from a machine elsewhere on the Internet, the Mac will need to have a fixed IP address and the router will need to be told to forward those requests directly to your Mac.
This is not a Mac-specific situation either. The exact same holds for Windows and Linux as well. All of them are simply plug-it-in-and-it-works until you want to do something special, in which case you need to now how to tell it.

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