5.1 network woes: solutions?

[Richard Hyde <rhyde uclink4 berkeley edu>]

I just installed 5.1 on a friends UDB (mine remains 5.0) over FTP.  I'd
like to thank Martin Peter for putting up the (fixed) mirror at
sunsite.auk.dk.  The install was surprisingly fast for coming such a long
way (to San Diego, CA via cable modem).  The install went smoothly but once
I booted from the dist I ran into several problems.  "man" just plain
didn't work... it segfaulted every time I tried to run it.  The GPM scripts
seemed to be broken (would refuse to restart or stop via the rc.d script).
The system would not bring up my eth1 as I requested in
/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth1.  I couldn't even manually bring
it up with ifconfig.  I would recompile the kernel and try the different
drivers (tulip) with different config options if the kernel sources were
installed (but for some reason they weren't).  When I went to fetch the
kernel sources I found that my internet connection wasn't working.  It
seems that route is broken too.  I checked dmesg and found that route
complains about syntax when the init scripts try to invoke it upon system
startup.  I never really ran into any problems with 5.0 (except my IP-masq
worked and on my fiends identical machine it didn't) but it seams that 5.1
created more problems than it fixed.  Has anyone else had the same
experiences?  I suppose I should wait for updates but I am eager to get it
up and running before I move next week.

Thanks for any input you can provide.

Richard Hyde
rhyde@uclink4.berkeley.edu