MythTV and Ubuntu 8.10

I have decided to start playing with MythTV. I have a Dell Inspiron 530 that I purchased a 750 GB SATA drive for so that I can use that HD when playing with MythTV.
My configuration is:

2 GB RAM
NVidia GeForce 8600 GT
750 GB SATA HD
SATA DVD+/-
Dvico Dual Digital 4

The first problem I encounted was the the computer did not operate on my network. For some reason even though the card was configured for DHCP it never was assigned an IP address. To overcome this problem I did the following.
Edit /etc/network/interfaces

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp

For some reason my eth0 setting were not listed.