how to bring up a plug-and-play Ethernet card in Linux?

[sgordon at kenan.com (Seth Gordon)]

(For those of you who've been tuned in for the past few months:
Remember that old 486?  Well, after recompiling the kernel failed to
get OpenBSD to recognize my modem, I gave up and installed Red Hat
Linux 6.0, which led to a new problem, namely....)

I have an ancient machine (a 486SX that's about five years old)
running Red Hat Linux, with plug-and-play modem and Ethernet cards.
After much study of the Linux ISAPNP documentation, I've set up an
/etc/isapnp.conf file that assigns appropriate port addresses and IRQs
to those two cards.  In my /etc/rc.d/rc.local script, I use setserial
to configure the serial device that the modem is attached to, and then
I use insmod to load 8390.o and ne.o (the card is an NE2000 clone).

When I load ne.o, I get a message on the screen, acknowledging that
the kernel recognizes the Ethernet card there.  However, if I type
ifconfig, I still only see the lo (loopback) device, and no Ethernet.
Likewise, there's no eth0 file under /dev.

What command have I left out that is preventing things from running?

--
perl -le"for(@w=(q[dm='r 0rJaa,u0cksthe';dc=967150;dz=~s/d/substrdm,\
(di+=dc%2?4:1)%=16,1ordi-2?'no':'Perl h'/e whiledc>>=1;printdz]))\
{s/d/chr(36)/eg;eval;}#In Windows type this all on 1 line w/o '\'s"
== seth gordon == sgordon at kenan.com == standard disclaimer ==
== documentation group, kenan systems corp., cambridge, ma ==


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