If the video card is ATI or nVidia, that won't work. You have to download the drivers which is a bit of a pain. Both are do-able, though.
And for network card, you probably have to load the driver. Most people (besides rabbit, I suppose) do the defaults when installing, which is setting up the network card for dhcp and enabling hotplug. Assuming you did those, and you have no interweb, you have to load the driver (every network card you'll ever see, most likely, has a driver).
Figure out the brand, google it to figure out the driver, then do "modprobe [drivername]"