RH9 on MSI 875P Neo m/b can't find on-board ethernet

This web site is amazing! -- But I didn't see an answer to this question:
I have a new system w/ an MSI 875P Neo motherboard. It has an on-board ethernet capability that is billed as Intel e1000 - equivalent. When I configure eth0 for an Intel e1000 and try to activate the connection, RH9 returns an error message, that the card is not found.
I am obviously doing something wrong.

My system dual-boots with RH9 or Win2000. When the system boots the bios displays an active Ethernet interface at IRQ10.
Under Win2000, installing the Windows network driver that came with the motherboard resulted in a working "Intel(R) PRO/1000 CT" network connection (Local Area Connection Properties dialog under the Control Panel | Networking applet).

(Ifconfig reports only the loopback, and doesn't see the ethernet chips).

How can I get this machine on the network under RH9? I know that I could get a NIC card that RH9 will see, and disable the on-board ethernet, but darn it, I want RH9 to use the on-board capability, saving me some $$$.

I'm very new at linux myself. But maybe these will help.

http://www.linuxhardware.org/article...56&mode=thread

http://downloadfinder.intel.com/scri...ProductID=1070

The website at linuxhardware says kernel 2.4.21 will work well with your motherboard. Just yesterday I finally got kernel 2.4.22 installed and working, thanks to a lot of help from a friend at work. Kernel 2.4.22 works fine and automatically recognized the ethernet onboard the motherboard. Sadly the kernel 2.4.22 disabled the NVIDIA driver for my MSI FX5600 graphics card so I've had to go back to using the generic graphics driver.