linux server problems...HELP!!!!

A little background:
I was curious about learning about webservers and such, so i compiled apache, and started one. I was having fun with it too, but now i've got a problem, not sure whats causing it. I dont know that much about the computer i'm running as a server, it was given to me by my mom who works for the town, its one of the ones the town no longer uses. All was running fine, when i had to shut it down last night to see if i could get my dsl modem working (another long story) and i wanted to take extra 'strain' off the internet line. Anyway, this morning i tried to boot it, and i'm getting all sorts of errors. First, i cant connect to the internet, gets stuck on "Bringing up eth0" and then fails. then a few other things fail, but it moves to quickly for me to see what they are :-/. Now i'm in text mode, and i cant do anything. I try to use startx or xinit to start gnome and get a few errors: (logged in as root)
Could not init font path element unix/:7100, removing from list!

Fatal server error:
could not open default font 'fixed'

then it tells me about reporting errors related to a server crash, and i get another error:
XIO: fatal IO error 104 (Connection reset by peer) on X server ":0.0" after 0 requests (0 known processed) with 0 events remaining.
I also cant open the log for free86 because it says i have to be root or trusted user (if you were paying attention, you'd find this odd, because i'm logged in as root)
PLEASE HELP!!!!!!!
~ben
(BTW: i'm using RH9 on my server, its got 128 megs of ram and i believe a P2 processor.)

 

To see the error messages during boot-up do dmesg | less and use up and down to navigate, try logging into X as another user (Starting anything as root is VVERRYY (Notice not only is it bold and capital, but I write each letter twice ) frowned upon, causes security risks and other problems), if that doesn't work, try making a new user (command is adduser) and see if that works, maybe it's just root's defautl config, post the errors from the dmesg | less and also tell us how your network is set-up and IP adresses, a little graph would be nice

 

I restarted and went into interactive startup, when it asks if i want to start service ATD and i say yes, it fails. I log on as Ben, and when i startx it fails, with the same errors.
I have my dsl modem going into a workgroup switch, which goes to each computer. I dont really have a network set up software-wise.
~Ben