The EliteGroup motherboard model L7VMM has an on-board Realtek 8139 Ethernet controller. The linux kernel on gentoo-grp-athlon-1.4_rc2.iso recognizes the NIC and it can be configured (inet addr, etc), but when I ping another host, the packets simply vanish -- /sbin/ifconfig reports zero packets sent/received, and /sbin/arp shows no hardware address. I also tried the Debian/woody kernels (2.2.20 and 2.4.18-bf2.4), and both work correctly. There is some slight mention on kernel-traffic of a problem with the 8139too driver -- it works when compiled into the kernel but not as a module -- but nothing recent, and no fix mentioned. There is also a driver rtl8139.c (the homepage has flames), but no mention of it on kernel-traffic. My fix (for the moment) is to load the stage-3 tarball from gentoo-grp-athlon-1.4_rc2.iso (formatting the partitions as ext2), then boot the Debian/woody 2.4.18-bf2.4 kernel, and load it into /boot (and its modules into /lib/modules/2.4.18-bf2.4). I then create a static binary of lilo-22.3.4 (on a RedHat 6.x box), copy it to /sbin, and configure/install lilo to boot the 2.4.18-bf2.4 image. Ugly, but at least I can then connect to the internet, and emerge (and emerge, and ...).
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 8495 ***
