If you are having issues with the NIC itself (i.e. you can install but no networking) then the firmware/driver probably needs to be installed. Some hardware only has proprietry dirvers available and generally these are not installed by default... 

If you keep in mind that TKL is based on Debian (v12.x based on Squeeze; v13.x on Wheezy) then Google may even be able to get you headed in the right direction?