I recently purchased an Asus F50sv laptop (P8600 processor / 4GB RAM / geForce 120M / 320gb 7200rpm drive, etc)

It came from NewEgg with Vista 32-bit installed, so I figured the easiest way to access all of my memory was to rebuild the whole thing on Linux

That was when my problems started. Fedora 10 won't load graphics (even off the live CD) and a text install wasn't able to find either the network card or the wireless card.

So, I burned an Ubuntu 8.04.1 (Hardy Heron) DVD and presto! the live version was able to boot graphically. Heartened by that progress, I went ahead and installed it. It loads an 'Avahi' ethernet driver, but is unable to start it properly. dmesg reports that the Link is not connected even though the router shows a green light (1000mb auto-neg) and a few bytes of traffic.

The Wireless doesn't even appear to be recognized as I don't see any modules loaded, nor are there any interfaces reported in wifconfig as having wireless extensions. Interestingly, though, the bluetooth adapter is recognized and seems to work just fine.

Any help getting this thing on the net would be greatly appreciated. Once I get that done, I'll worry about the little things like getting the Fn keys to work, etc.

thanks in advance.

Downloaded and installed Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackelope) and now have audio and wireless available, but cannot get either to connect to my router, either via static or dhcp.

In /var/log/messages, I see "ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): eth0: link is not ready" (substitute wlan0 for eth0 for the wireless adapter) when i do an /etc/init.d/networking restart

in /etc/networking/interfaces, I have:
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp
auto wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp