I am a relative newbie to linux. I have used Mandrake 9x and Redhat 8/9 for over a year, and never really learned anything because everything is configured for you. So I loaded Gentoo after hearing how great it is. The computer is a Dell Latitude CpxJ laptop with a Xircom RealPort Eth. 10/100 RE-100 PCMCIA card. When I booted from the CD I had to run net-setup eth0 to configure a static address. (DHCP always worked in mdk and rh)

when I run ifconfig eth0 I get all sorts of info about my card with the exception of any IP addresses. When I run dhcpcd eth0 it sits there for about a minute and goes back to the prompt, not address, no error.

I tried to make it static using ifconfig eth0 192.168.253.105, but i don't get any DNS that way and don't know how to enter it. (and would prefer to use DHCP, but at this point I don't care)

I also tried to locate net-setup, which is how I got it working in the first place, but it doesn't seem like it is on the system (I ran locate net-setup)

Thanks for any help!!