First take a look at your network devices with

ifconfig

You should see your eth0 device showing a brand new inet addr: of something like 192.168.2.31. Also the entry of dropped packets should be zero. And you should see some Rx packets: and Tx packets: values. If you see dropped packets or Tx packets without Rx packets, you have problems and need to troubleshoot.

Perhaps your ethernet card or chip was not detected. Take a look to see if a card was configured properly.

Also, there may not be a DHCP server operating on your network. Is your cable/dsl router configured to assign DHCP IP addresses?

Lastly, does your ethernet card have lights lit up and is it connected to your network with a functional cat 5 cable?

DHCP client support in Linux is stable, mature and very usable. It's generally pretty straightforward to set up and use. For larger networks of clients it greatly simplifies the maintanence of IP address allocation.

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