excerpt not displaying ellipsis

Maybe another set of eyes will help with this.

I have a development install of 2.8.1 that wont display excepts with the ellipsis and link. Instead it just shows the text excerpt – no ellipsis, no link to permalink.

There are no plugins installed, or activated (obviously), and Im using this in the default theme:

<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

                        <div <?php post_class() ?> id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>">
                                <h2><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title_attribute(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h2>
                                <small><?php the_time('F jS, Y') ?> <!-- by <?php the_author() ?> --></small>

                                <div class="entry">
                                        <?php the_excerpt(); ?>
                                </div>

                                <p class="postmetadata"><?php the_tags('Tags: ', ', ', '<br />'); ?> Posted in <?php the_category(', ') ?> | <?php edit_post_link('Edit', '', ' | '); ?>  <?php comme$
                        </div>

                <?php endwhile; ?>

                <div class="navigation">
                        <div class="alignleft"><?php next_posts_link('&laquo; Older Entries') ?></div>
                        <div class="alignright"><?php previous_posts_link('Newer Entries &raquo;') ?></div>
                </div>

        <?php else : ?>

                <h2 class="center">Not Found</h2>
                <p class="center">Sorry, but you are looking for something that isn't here.</p>
                <?php get_search_form(); ?>

        <?php endif; ?>

Am i missing something really obvious? I have other versions of wordpress blogs on this same server, and all of them show the ellipsis and link.

Thx.