Network problem

Hello everyone,

I just aquired a new Lenovo G770 laptop and am having a strange issue with
the Ethernet Controller.

Network connection works fine for a few minutes then dies. The interface
is still configured though but it just stops working. There are no error
messages in dmesg either.

My router is not a problem. Access is granted and it does work to begin
with and the logs show nothing abnormal.

I've seen a few threads concering the G770 with Ubuntu but nothing that
addresses this problem.

Output of ifconfig -a

eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx
                   inet addr:xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx  Bcast:xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
Mask:xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
                   inet6 addr: xxxx::xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx/64 Scope:Link
                   UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
                   RX packets:3983 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
                   TX packets:3139 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:1
                   collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
                   RX bytes:4773236 (4.5 MiB)  TX bytes:457213 (446.4 KiB)
                   Interrupt:27


The output of lspic -v
01:00.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications AR8152 v2.0 Fast
Ethernet (rev c1)
                 Subsystem: Lenovo Device 3979
                 Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 27
                 Memory at d0500000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=256K]
                 I/O ports at 2000 [size=128]
                 Capabilities: [40] Power Management version 3
                 Capabilities: [48] MSI: Enable+ Count=1/1 Maskable- 64bit+
                 Capabilities: [58] Express Endpoint, MSI 00
                 Capabilities: [6c] Vital Product Data
                 Capabilities: [100] Advanced Error Reporting
                 Capabilities: [180] Device Serial Number
xx-xx-xx-xx-xx-xx-xx-xx
                 Kernel driver in use: atl101:00.0

Anybody have an idea what could be happening with the Eternet controller
and how I can fix it?

Another issue are the function keys. On my old Thinkpad, the
tpb package worked very well, however, that package isn't available on
amd64. What other possibility is there to get the function keys to work?

Thanks for any help!
regexes