Type ifconfig and you should see eth0, another one is to use dmesg | grep eth and if it's not on those try, lspci

oh yeah, that is right. one time when i first started using the 2.6 kernel i didn't think my modules had been compiled or loaded right, so i went back to doing it the old way, and out of habit of doing that i totally forgot it wasn't required anymore! i didn't know make made the bzImage, though, i thought only make dep had been done away with and make modules wasn't required. anyway, good to see theMonkey is making progress, at least.

another question i see coming up is redirecting the symbolic link -- my question is why even have that? why not just unpack the kernel source in /usr/src and do everything from the linux-2.x.x. directory without symbolic links? will it mess something up later, maybe something that needs to find or point to the kernel?

Doing the symlink to /usr/src/linux is a non-required at all step in compile and install a new kernel, but instead for third-party modules like driver for video card or program that search include files in /usr/src/linux to compile but in general they find them in /lib/modules/`uname -r`/build.

I think in a rare circonstance an installation of a certain program/module may fail if this link not set, I don't know...

yeah cedriks right, i learnt the hard way.
if u try and install nvidia drivers and the symlink is not pointing to the kernel you wish to use, it'll install ok but it wont work properly if there is a significant difference between kernels -- i forgot to do that when upgrading from 2.4 to 2.6 and x wouldnt even start