I managed to set this OS up but can't connect to the internet for the life of me (i'm using my wife's computer). Any suggestions guys. I feel like the proverbial "stranger in a strange land."

Yeah, there are so many moving parts in something like this. But the first 2 key questions are:

Is the OS recognizing the network adapter?
Is the network adapter seeing the router?

If you don't have an "eth0" device, you need to start with the OS finding the hardware. If all that looks OK, but you're getting a bogus IP address, you need to get the thing to find your router/modem so it can get an IP address. If you have a good IP address, you need to look at DNS settings and such.

So many places for things to go awry...

Is your problem with wifi?  I had the same issue on my dell latitude d610. If it is you need to connect using a ethernet connection and run a system update. This will load the packages they could not fit in the .iso image. You should not have any problems with the ethernet.