I have a new acer laptop Aspire 5760 with the duo core processor. It works fine with windows. I've install fedore core 4 and it doesn't seen to detect the ethernet card on eth0. lspci reports that it is a Broadcom NetLink BCM5789 Gigabit Ethernet PCI Express. Fedora correctly put in the tg3 driver, so something is going right, but ifup eth0 reports 'tg3 device does not seem to be present, delaying initialization'.

I've tried installing other flavors of linux (opensuse, ubuntu), by network install, but no surprise, they don't see the network card either.

Is the problem possibly the PCI Express interface? Any ideas?

You could try turning on/off the motherboard assigning IRQs. This is often labeled "Plug and Play OS <yes/no>" in the CMOS BIOS settings.

You can do basically the same thing with the Linux kernel. You can enter the boot parameter "pci=routeirq".

You can look around this web site and others to see if your NIC is known to have problems with Linux.

You could look to see if the driver module is loaded.

$ lsmod <module name>

You could try loading the module.

$ modprobe <module name>

Some modules may need some configuration parameters when they load. You'll have to look that up.

I know that you tried Ubuntu but did you install it or did you use the live cd? The live cd is typically good at detecting hardware. I've heard that when you install Ubuntu onto a hard drive it doesn't automatically detect and configure hardware. You could also try another live cd that's known to be good at autodetecting hardware such as the Knoppix live cd.