Help:Problems with routing

[Vittorio <vdemart@supereva.it>]

Please help!  
I can connect my portable PC to my desktop via ethernet
cards (eth0) and use ping, NFS, samba etc.

Now, after re-reading Net-HOWTO and following the examples in it, I've
been trying to set my desktop and its eth0 and ppp0 connections as a
router for my portable in order to use email and the internet on it by
means of ethernet connection. In a nutshell, the first 'extremely
simple' routing configuration in the HOWTO!  

Even though I've followed the easy instructions using the command
'route add..' etc, it simply doesn't work in my case.

Here it is  the basic configuration info

On both system woody with 2.4.13 kernel

On my desktop (the would-be router)

Eth0 192.168.10.5 (desktop as an alias)

# route
Destination     Gateway         Genmask         Flags Metric Ref    Use Iface
212.210.33.130  *               255.255.255.255 UH    0      0        0 ppp0
192.168.10.0    *               255.255.255.0   U     0      0        0 eth0
default         desktop         0.0.0.0         UG    0      0        0 eth0

On my portable PC (the only client)

# route  
Kernel IP routing table
Destination     Gateway         Genmask         Flags Metric Ref    Use Iface
default         desktop         255.255.255.0   UG    0      0        0 eth0
192.168.10.0    *               255.255.255.0   U     0      0        0 eth0


I can of course ping the eth0 on both sides using also their aliases
but......
the result when I try to ping a working internet address from my client is as
follows:

#ping 195.110.96.65    #

PING 195.110.96.65 (195.110.96.65): 56 data bytes
ping: sendto: Network is unreachable
ping: wrote 195.110.96.65 64 chars, ret=-1


What's wrong with it?

Vittorio