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Description of Problem: This took ages to work out. Laptop install on a Sony Vaio with one pcmcia slot. This slot normally contains the wireless card. For the install, it needed to have the CD in it. (Well, the pcmcia card attached to the CD drive, if that makes more sense.) Install completed. Could _not_ get wireless networking to work. Eventually light dawned. Because the wireless card was not it, eth0 didn't get set up. Surely a single slot which can be either wireless or CD is not uncommon. I have spent days wondering what was going on here (and I feel stupid for not realising sooner.) Eventually ran redhat-config-network and /etc/init.d/pcmica restart and got networking back. Perhaps for laptop installs it should prompt with something about "Will the wireless card go where the CD is?" or something, because I don't think it's at all obvious what's going on when the networking stops. I was running over the house testing signal strength for ages.
One of the steps in firstboot will be to set up an internet connection if one isn't currently active. This will happen in the "Register with RHN screen". If the user decides to connect to RHN, we'll try to ping www.redhat.com. If we can't connect, ask the user if they would like to configure a network connection. If they say yes, then internet-druid (part of redhat-config-network) gets run. I think that this would have fixed the problem in your case except maybe the part about /etc/init.d/pcmcia restart. I dunno if internet-druid can handle that on it's own.
This is definately a first-boot/neat issue. The installer is only going to handle the hardware required to get the system installed.
Didn't get done for GinGin. Marking as an RFE for next time.
The combination of hotplug, NetworkManager, kudzu, etc. should now be taking care of problems with PCMCIA wireless cards. For instance, my Netgear FA401 PCMCIA card was set up properly upon bootup under FC4.