Nic card on Dell X300 laptop on backtrack

[macubergeek]

I'm having the devil of a time getting the nic card to work on my Dell X300 laptop.
I'm using backtrack security distro installed to hard drive.
lspci tells me the nic is:
Broadcom NetXtreme BCM5705M Gigabyte Ethernet rev 01
when I do modprobe -l | grep bcm I see:
bcm3510.ko and bcm203x.ko

to set up the interface I do:
ifconfig eth0 up --> eth0 shows as up in ifconfig eth0 after this.
dhcpcd
the dhcpcd command takes a long time. Occasionally it gets me a dhcp lease from my linksys router, but only occasionally.
So I try to manually set ip
ifconfig eth0 192.168.1.20 netmask 255.255.255.0
route add default gw 192.168.1.1
when I ping 192.168.1.1 I get host is unreachable.
I can't ping either localhost or 127.0.0.1
I suspect I don't have the proper driver for the nic card.
The laptop has a docking station with it's own nic.
When I do the install I have to use the docking station.
I suspect the installer detected the docking nic but nothing else.
Can anyone tell me how to verify which driver loaded for the laptop nic and/or how to find a nic for this card? I'll go off now and check the broadcom site. Will this involve kernel source code?

Jk

[macubergeek]

I'm running kerel 2.6.15.6. I downloaded the broadcom driver and the readme.txt file indicates that the 2.6 kernel already supports this broadcom card. Curious.
Any ideas?