HP/Compaq NX5000 laptop Broadcom network card problem

[Bret Busby <bret@busby.net>]

Hello.

I have an HP/Compaq NX5000 laptop, that I dual boot into Windows XP Pro and 
Debian 4.0.

The network access is okay with Windows XP, but works only intermittently with 
Debian.

I am wondering whether something is wrong with the network card driver in 
Debian 4.0.

I do not know how to find what is the network card driver (the name of the 
driver software) that is being used by Debian 4.0.

The PCI listing in the KDE Info Center, shows the Ethernet card as
"Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4401-B0 100Base-TX (rev 02) "
and with
"Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 64, IRQ 209".

In the Interrupts table in the KDE Info Center, the line shows
"209   47745   IO-APIC-level eth1"

The Network Interfaces table in the KDE Info Center, shows three lines
of text; one for each of eth0, eth1, and lo.

Please advise how I can resolve the problem between Debian 4.0 and the network 
card, as, that the network card seems to work without any problems with Windows 
XP, appears to show that the network card is not faulty.

After some searching on the Internet, I found a web page at 
http://downgra.de/x20/ , which showed that that author apparently got the NIC 
operational, by using the manufacturer's driver.

So, after a bit if searching, I found a web page apparently for the NIC driver, 
at http://www.broadcom.com/support/ethernet_nic/4401.php , from which I
downloaded the Linux(i386) driver, which I think is a g.zip file.

And, in reading the README.TXT file, the driver is apparently included with 
kernel 2.6.x, and so it is apparently already included in the installed Linux 
and apparently, simply does not work very well.

Thank you in anticipation.

--
Bret Busby
Armadale
West Australia
..............

"So once you do know what the question actually is,
 you'll know what the answer means."
- Deep Thought,
  Chapter 28 of Book 1 of
  "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
  A Trilogy In Four Parts",
  written by Douglas Adams,
  published by Pan Books, 1992
....................................................