Network with Linux not working

Half a year ago I bought a Notebook (Lenovo 3000 N500). It came with Windows Vista pre-installed. With Windows everything seemed to work. I could hook the notebook to the network and thereby access the internet. Since Windows is just not ‚it‘ I installed Ubuntu. There only the wireless networking worked. Serious web research did not offer any solutions. Therefore I describe it here:
If you issue the ifconfig command you will only get the lo loopback interface and if enabled the wlan0 interface. The device eth0 is available under /dev. If you issue ifconfig eth0 the interface information is displayed, though no IP is assigned. If you try to bring it up through ifconfig up eth0 you will receive the error No such device even though we verified the existence of the device.
It seems to me like a hardware problem which windows is better suited to handle. I get the impression that Windows™ is expected to handle faulty harware or hardware configuration.
The solution to hook the notebook up with the network with Linux was to buy an external USB adapter for the network. I choose the D-Link DUB-E100 since it is verified to work with Linux (Kernel version 2.4.22).