1. Boot off the Owl x86_64 CD.

2. When the shell prompt appears, enter "setup".

3. In "setup", choose "Set root password" and set a temporary root
password for the CD-booted system.

4. Also in "setup", choose "Configure network" to configure networking
for the CD-booted system.

5. Do not bother configuring anything else, just "Exit" from "setup".

6. "exit" from the single-user shell.  The system will proceed to boot
into multi-user, and a "login:" prompt should appear.

7. Make sure you can ping the system at the IP address you've
configured.  Similarly, make sure you can SSH into the system at the
IP address and with the temporary root password you've configured.
(If not, repair whatever you might have misconfigured, either by
starting this procedure from scratch or by logging in and fixing it if
you know how to do that.)

An alternative test is to login to the CD-booted system and try to ping
another machine from it.

A potential problem is that the machine may have multiple NICs, whereas
you'd only connect cables to some of them.  You may fix this by
re-connecting cables until ping succeeds or by configuring other NICs in
the system (but avoid having the same network/netmask configured on
multiple interfaces at once).  To get a list of all Ethernet interfaces
the Linux kernel sees, run the commands:

ip link | fgrep eth
dmesg | fgrep eth

8. Leave the system at the login prompt and communicate to us two
things: the temporary root password and the system's IP address you've set.