recently installed mandrake 10 community on my
dell inspiron 9100
my network card is
broadcom 4400 series (module = b44)
recognized by drakconnect and installed on eth0

cable/hardware is good (windows side connects)

ifup eth0
gives
<long pause> "...Failed"(if start at boot is off)
or
"...failed; no link present. Check cable?" (if start at boot is on)

trying to connect to a linksys router->dsl modem
(no lights appear on router in the laptop's slot)

ifconfig says
eth0:

link encap: ethernet hwaddr 00:0d:56:eb:04:bf
inet6 addr: fe80::20b:56ff:feeb:4bf/64 scope:link
up broadcast multicast mtu:1500 metric:1
rx packets all zero
tx packets all zero
collisions 0 txqueuelen 1000
rx,tx bytes = 0
int:11

also output about loopback whatever that is, is that useful? it looks very similar except there are 308 packets in rx and tx

also tried booting with noapic just now to no avail

is your router running dhcp or static?

If static what is the ip address of the laptop?

I buy the same laptop as you, and I found the same problem. Finally, I found if I disable wireless card in bios, network is ok.
you can try it. Hope it helpful.

I also have an Inspriron 9100 and I got the integrated NIC working with the bcm4400 (NOT THE B44 that comes with the kernel) but the bcm44XX driver from www.broadcom.com.

Just make install it and remove your b44 from your modules directory (otherwise it will still get loaded at boot).

I have the same laptop and had a small issue a while back when i dualed 2k3 and slackware. it would work on occassion but not consistently. and if my laptop went into standby, it would kill the network connection. I would wind up having to reboot to get it to work again. so i grabbed the bcm4400 drivers from broadcomm like you did and removed the b44 module.. everything works like a charm.. my advice would be to follow BMorpheus suggestion and grab the bcm4400 from broadcom's site and use that one.