Hi
With respect to network:
Maybe you should enable contrib and non-free in /apt/sources.list (add contrib non-free after main on the deb and deb-src lines) - I dont know how many there are required, if any, I have not checked that.
You might need to install the firmware-linux package.
Depending on which wendor the nic are, you might need to install vendor drivers, e.g. for ath nic's I have installed firmware-atheros package.