With some work X and the gigabit network card operate properly.
Forget about using Yast to configurate X, because it makes a mess of it, do the X configuration manually.
The linksys card has to be compiled into the kernel separately, but this is easily done. Install the ‘kernel sources’ package, go (as uesr root ) to /usr/src/linux and type ‘make oldconfig’, so that the current system configuration is represented in the kernel configuration. Then unzip the linksys install script somewhere (e.g. in /root/) and run it. The install script takes care of everything for you - it checks system prerequisites, and compiles the ethernet driver module so it fits with your kernel.
After compiling the kernel module (you don’t need to reboot like in Windows :-) ), do ‘modprobe sk98lin’ and ‘ifup eth0’ and everything should work as usual. At home and everywhere at clients, I use ‘dhcpcd’ to the rest of my network configuration for me, so that’s no effort either.
I finally got it to work without overheating. Add ‘acpi=off’ and ‘noapic’ to the grub command line (in /boot/grub/menu.lst) .
More info about this laptop on tuxmobil.org/asus_l5800c.html and tuxmobil.org/asus.html