My PC is a IBM Thinkpad T20. It is connected to a Linksys router, which connects to a cable modem. Under Windows I get a IP address via DHCP from the Linksys. It connects to the Internet fine.

Today I am trying a slax bootable CD. It mostly works, except that it does not detect the laptop's ethernet card. When entering "ifconfig", it only shows the Local Loopback, no sign of eth0.

Any tips for how to get eth0 recognized would be appreciated.

I had a problem like yours with Slax. My problem was not a failure to detect the NIC, rather some dhcp failure. I did not see this error when booting Knoppix or Kanotix. I thought it might be an issue with how Slax was trying to obtain dhcp info from my router, but oddly enough I could boot Slax from my two other computers (same router) and it would dhcp just fine.

What I did on the problem computer was watch closely as the boot messages scrolled by. There was a call to "dhcpcd" with a few command line options that I can't remember off the top of my head. After it finished booting I did not have an IP address. I ran the exact same dhcpcd command I had observed during the boot process but added the -S option. This worked, and I had an IP address assigned. This manual step is required every time I boot Slax from this particular computer. Weird. I seem to remember that I could even run the identical boot dhcpcd command, without adding the -S option, and that still worked too. But I'm not 100% sure I'm remembering this correctly because I was working on multiple computers and might have confused myself as to which options worked on which computers. I haven't used Slax enough to have this little gotcha's details burned permanently into my brain. I just remember it was some problem with dhcpcd.

Thanks for the suggestion. I've tried a number of dhcp commands, but none of them work. Something more fundemental is wrong and the ethernet card just isn't recognized at all.