Problems upgrading from 2.4 to 2.6 -- no more networking

[wads]

I was experiencing bizarre behavior under my 2.4 kernel. I unmerged a bunch of applications and was going to rebuild (re-emerge) them, but was hit with compile errors. I was stuck with no GUI and very little in the way of applications. I decided that since I was going to be basically rebuilding this machine from scratch that I would upgrade to a 2.6 kernel since so many on the Gentoo forums sing its praises.

I read up on the procedure before starting and finally went for it. My initial stab yielded a really unattractive gentoo logo screen (it has all sorts of lines through it) and a system hang. I changed some framebuffer kernel config options and tried again. Success. I could now log in.

I was prepared to deal with some nVidia module issues because they were oft discussed on the forums. However, I can't patch my nvidia stuff because my wireless modules no longer work. Yes, I rebuilt them. Yes, I can load them and lsmod reports them. But if I do iwconfig, only my loopback shows up.

Without wireless access, I can't download the patches I need or the latest versions of the stuff I want to emerge. When I run "iwconfig ath0",
I get the following message: error fetching interface. device not found

Any ideas would be great.

Thanks all!
-David

[wads]

I figured it out and I'm on to the next problem. Here's the solution:

I was getting error messages in my log files related to acpi, so I disabled it. However, once I did that, I started getting an IRQ conflict with my wireless card. I re-enabled acpi, rebuilt my kernel, and the problem resolved.

-David