alright, really weird problem. the other night i installed slackware 10.2 on my box. tried to get wireless working, no luck, so i moved it down to where an ethernet connection would work. plugged it in, booted up, no problems, internet worked right away. i haven't changed any hardware, and i haven't installed/changed/removed any network/internet related programs. i did try to set up samba, but that didn't work too well, but even during those reboots, the internet still worked. however, today i boot up, try to log onto Gaim, and it's not working. i ran ifconfig, and all that showed up was lo. so i went through netconfig again, and it said i didn't have tcpip installed. so i put in my slackware 10.2 disc one, went to the /n folder, and installed the tcpip package. i tried running ifconfig again, eth0 came up this time, but wasn't getting an ip. so i rebooted. when i was back in fluxbox, i tried running netconfig again, and lo and behold, it didn't see tcpip as installed again. any suggestions? all i really use this box for is internet, so it's kind of crucial to get it working again. thanks in advance.

make sure the low-level stuff is working right. do you see the ethernet driver when you type 'lsmod'? are there any strange things in the boot messages ('dmesg | less')? Also make sure that the dhcp client your using (if any) is installed and working correctly.

debugging network problems are perhaps the hardest bugs to squash. Your starting universe of things that can go wrong just about covers any computer anywhere in the world that can talk to yours. You first have to debug things to make sure the problem is with your machine and your network configuration. Then move on to modules and drivers...