Just thought this might be usefull to someone.

As a quick pre-amble I shall give you some history on my problem. As of 2 days ago I still considered myself a Linux newbie and a slave to M$. I decide to see what all this "complile you own kernel" and "Linux 2.6" is all about. I build myself a linux box using Slackware 9.1, get it up and running and download the kernel sources.

I compile the kernel, do the lilo dance and re-boot the machine. Everything looks fine until I notice that I can't ping anything, and ifconfig only shows a loopback adapter. NUTS.

OK, time to check the kernel configuration as I MUST have missed the NIC driver. Ahh, I have, so I compile it into the kernel and re-boot. Whats this, the kernel is too big and overlaps the lilo something or other??? a quick search on google ( from my still working 2.4.22 kernel, winners do backups! ) reveals that I forgot to do the lilo dance after I had re-compiled the kernel. I lilo dance the machine and 2.6 boots.... still with no networking. Some more searching on google seems to indicate the for some reason or another ( I am hoping someone can tell me why ) the 2.6 kernel is not loading the eepro100 module at boot. A quick edit of /etc/rc.d/rc.modules to remove the comment from:
#/sbin/modprobe eepro100
and a final re-boot, networking is finally working and I can type this from my 2.6.1 box.

Huzzah!

I hope this helps someone as all the other info I found while searching was quite cryptic. Now, can someone tell me why I had to do what I did to get the networking working?

PS. I have managed to learn how to use vi during all the fun and games, is there no better cmdline editor??

You had to do the "LILO dance" because when you changed the kernel, you had to add the new image to the bootloader (LILO). When you make changes to LILO, you must run the command lilo to have them saved.

You had to have the correct module for your NIC, because that is similar to a driver file in Windoze.

You can use pico from the command line interface. You cannot save the file you edit with pico unless you're logged in as super user (su), so su to root (type su and then give your password) before using pico. When you have a file open in pico, you will see the instructions at the bottom of the screen. As with most things in *nix, you can get more information from the manual pages on your comp by typing, for example ->
$ man pico

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