Just like to chime in here briefly. I also own an Averatec laptop (3250, I think) and am experiencing the same issue with ethernet in dapper.
However, the ethernet will work properly (even after loading X) if I disable ACPI in grub (adding "acpi=off" to the end of the boot command). Of course this is a suboptimal solution but I hope that helps someone fix this, as I know very little about linux myself.
Just like to chime in here briefly. I also own an Averatec laptop (3250, I think) and am experiencing the same issue with ethernet in dapper.
However, the ethernet will work properly (even after loading X) if I disable ACPI in grub (adding "acpi=off" to the end of the boot command). Of course this is a suboptimal solution but I hope that helps someone fix this, as I know very little about linux myself.