network cards

Well, another newbie plight for me. I am setting up a linux firewall that

has two Linksys Etherfast 10/100 NIC's in it.  I was not asked to set them
up during the install however.  If I do cat /proc/pci    I see them just
fine.  I tried to create my own /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-ethX
file but to no avail.  I then appended lilo.conf with the IRQ's and IO for
my cards but still no good.  Every time it tries to bring up the interfaces
it says "No such device.  Error fetching interface:Device not found"  I even
went into linuxconfig and added the IRQ's and IO's for the cards.  I am
using the tulip.o module.  Do I need to recompile my kernel before I use the
module?  tulip.o  is listed in my /lib/modules/curentkernelversion/net dir.
Is there a better way to set up new network cards under linux??  Thanks for
the newbie help in advance.

- Joel