New to Kali and trying to run it live

By far I am not Linux wizard but have used BackTrack for some time both installed and live. I wanted to change to Kali and got an installer disc for 32 bit. When I tried to run it live I got to the root and toor login and password but as I would have done when the orange red prompt came up in backtrack I entered "startx" but I get the following error that eth0: link down.
What is it telling me? It is a stand alone older Intel Pentium 4 Emachine computer that did run backtrack live before with no Ethernet network attached with a Kasens G9000 Realtek RTL8187L attached for wifi.
What might I be doing wrong?

As I recall when running Kali from disc, it booted directly into the GUI.

Do you have another machine in which you can try the disc? Also, did you verify the hash of the downloaded ISO...to make sure it didn't get corrupted in download?

yes I do have another computer I can try it on and will soon The disc I bought on ebay from a source that has sold a lot but guess the burn might have been corrupted. I figured I would need a doubled sided DVD and the cost of the ebay purchase shipped was very reasonable. Thank you for your thoughts.

No problem, hope it works out for you. :)