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So, personally, I have never really had to install Gentoo in a Virtualized environment so normally my networking and everything has worked right out of the box from the basic kernel configurations selected when you run “make menuconfig”.

Unbeknown to me, that would not at all be the case when you virtualize Gentoo with VMWare or VirtualBox. As some of you may know, VMware and VirtualBox both use a pcnet32 driver/module to enable networking. Now, after a ton of googling and back and forth I finally figured out what you have to do.

When you execute “make menuconfig”

make menuconfig

Then, when you’re prompted with the options, step through the menu as such

Device Drivers
    |----------> Network Device Support
                    |---------------> [ * ] Ethernet (10 or 100mbit)
                                                 |--------->[ * ] AMD PCNet32 PCI Support

Make sure you press “Y” to include it rather than modularize it (unless you have an initrd.img setup and want/need to modularize it) so this way you dont have to worry about editing

/etc/modules.autoload.d/

or having to do anything else for that matter to get networking working with the virtualized network/ethernet adapters

Then

# make -j2
# cp /usr/src/linux/arch/x86/boot/bzImage /boot/kernel
# reboot