There's no entry in /usr/share/hwdata/pcitable for 8086:1015, which is a recent version of the Intel Pro/1000 and which is used as the gigabit ethernet interface for most of IBM's current desktop offerings. The e1000 driver, specified manually, works fine on this hardware under kernel-2.4.20-18.9.
Are you sure? 8086:1015 was added to the pcitable on 2003-02-11, and was in 0.70-1. 9 shipped with 0.75-1.
Arrgh, sorry, it's 8086:1013 that's missing; summary change. (And *that* hardware does indeed nonetheless work with e1000.)
OK, that one was added in hwdata-0.83-1.