Dummy lan question

[Vaughn Treude]

Hello:
Yet another dumb question related to my new setup.  My NIC is configured and 
ifconfig claims it's UP.  I have the table set up correctly - at least, it's 
configured the same as on my older Mandrake system (see below.)  I know the 
NIC, cable and router all work because it worked in Red Hat on the system in 
question.  I've supposedly set the firewall rules "off" because this is an 
internal system.  What happens is that when I try to ping any other system on 
the LAN (or any other system tries to ping the new system) I get "Destination 
Host Unreachable."  A check of the ifconfig seems to indicate that eth0 has 
no send or receive bytes, but loopback (lo) increases the values of both 
numbers each time I do the ping.  The "hostname" is set correctly; the 
computer with that hame "vaughn.nakota.com"  is defined with the correct IP 
address in the hosts file.  I also tried tinkering with the hosts.allow file, 
but my other systems work with out it (hosts.deny is empty.)   

Output of route:
Destination     Gateway         Genmask         Flags Metric Ref    Use Iface
192.168.1.0     *               255.255.255.0   U     0      0        0 eth0
127.0.0.0       *               255.0.0.0       U     0      0        0 lo
default         basil           0.0.0.0         UG    0      0        0 eth0

The system "basil" is my gateway and its IP is defined in the hosts file.
Any ideas?  It seems like I've probably got some simple setting wrong 
somewhere.

Thanks,
Vaughn