Support for Ethernet cards is often provided by a loadable driver-module, of which there seem to be many dozen in a typical "distro." If your (original) system is up, you can figure out which one is actually used via
lsmod. There's a very good chance that it's a single driver called
tulip.
What you need to do, then, is to include that driver in your kernel. I prefer to have
all device-drivers that are actually needed by my system, right in my kernel, and to omit all of the rest so that loadable kernel-modules are needed for any step of routine system operation .. certainly not for startup.
Failing that, you'll need to make sure that the proper module
is loaded, perhaps by surfing the
dmesg command-output. That mechanism has changed considerably from 2.4 to 2.6. (And perhaps that's the biggest reason why I chose to avoid it entirely.)
Yeah, it might take a little bit of recompiling ... maybe a
lot (not too likely) ... but hey, that's why you're
here and not
over there, eh?
