Basically the linux doesnt really play nicely with the drivers and are often in disabled state on install. Sometimes it grabs the wrong driver too for this.
The only workaround I found to work is to first use a 'USB TETHERING' device (eg your android phone) and then connect to ethernet that way.
There is another layer of complexity if doing it from commandline. This is outlined below:
Commands assume that you have sbin in your PATH var. And probably doing it all in root user (su -)