Jukas, I have exactly the same motherboard and I can't get Debian make a fresh install on it. It can't find the NIC card and it can't find the CD ROM either.

I tried ETCH too, same result.

what installator did you use?

Try one of the Sarge images from here they have newer kernels so should have better hardware detection possibilities with them.

I found that even the 2.6.17 kernels didn't recognize the nic off the bat, so here's what I had to do.

Plug in an old Intel 10/100 and do a netinstall of Etch. Download the newest kernel available via apt (I think I got 2.6.17). Go to realteks site and download the linux drivers for that nic. Compile & Install.

Do note, if you are like me where the box sites in a data center, I'd highly recommend pinning your kernel with apt. If you download a new kernel and reboot to it, your onboard nic will stop working. Not that *I'd* do anythign that dumb

Hopefully future kernels will support this nic by default but until then I'd store the nic drivers in /usr/src or /usr/local/src and only do kernel upgrades if you're actually at the console.