I'm running a slackware 10.2 on a acer 4152 travelmate laptop,
with the bareacpi.i (2.4.31) Kernel.
The ethernet is workin fine on windowsXP. ifconfig shows the eth0 interface but ethernet led's dont glow. ping on the loopback ip does show a reply.
What do i do?

Post ifconfig, lsmod, and lspci if you can, please.

Are you using the generic broadcom Windows driver, or did you download one from their web site? I had this very same issue on a mobo with a broadcom NIC a couple of years ago. Everything worked fine until I downloaded the Windows driver from their site and installed it, after that it wouldn't work in Linux. When Windows shut down the LED's on the back went out and never came back on until I booted to windows. The way I fixed it was to download the Linux driver from their site and use it instead of the default kernel module. When I did that, everything worked fine.

Not sure if this is the problem in your case, but you never know.

HTH,
MMYoung

Sorry for the late response! actually my box went down, a cracked lcd
nevermind, it's fixed for the moment. A strange thing that happened was that before the lcd crack, the ethernet was giving problems even on a fresh install but. I tried reinstalling the OS with the new driver from the site and that's well for now..
thanx anyways for the suggestion..
And sorry to cwwilson721 for missing out the ifconfig, lspci and lsmod in the first post.