First thing to check: are you sure your network card is being found by your kernel? Post the output of lsmod.

When you say "However, I can resolve a host (www.yahoo.com)", do you mean you CAN, or is that a typo, and you CAN'T? Describe your network setup; namely, are you using DHCP? I assume not, but if you can use DHCP, things will be much easier for you. When you say "it'll show up", do you mean eth0 shows up in the output of ifconfig? Post the output of ifconfig.

I don't know what net-config does. Did you read this: http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handboo...?part=1&chap=3 , particularly "3.d. Manual Network Configuration".