Simple network problem

[Robert Epprecht <epprecht@cybercity.ch>]

I want to link an old laptop to my pc.

I have done this before using Debian potato on my pc and another (older)
Linux installation on the laptop, so I know it is not a hardware problem.
Now I have woody on both machines.  The pc side works OK and I can use
the network (if I boot my *old* Linux system on the laptop).  But when I
boot woody on the laptop I'm out of luck:

ping pc
ping: sendto: Network is unreachable
(I can't ping from the pc to the laptop either).

My knowledge/experience with networks is very limited,
so I search a bit everywhere I can think of:

As the link goes over a PCMCIA card I suspected a missing module or
something, but I see with dmesg:
eth0: NE2000 (DL10019 rev 05): io 0x300, irq 3, ...

ifconfig shows lo only

ifconfig eth0 up
eth0: found link beat
eth0: autonegotiation complete: 100baseT-FD selected
But ping does still not work.

route shows only title lines, no entries.

I think I must have missed a very basic installation/configuration step,
but which one?

Thanks a lot for your help,
Robert