Ethernet shield v1.1 does not show up on NETGEAR DG834G

Hi everyone!
I'm an Arduino newbie, and this is my first post in the forum.
I purchased a chinese ethernet shield, with an ENC28J60 chip, but I'm having troubles in connecting it to my DG834G NETGEAR router.
I'm running Arduino IDE 0022 on Ubuntu 10.10, I connected my Arduino duemilanove to my laptop via usb, and the shield to my DG834G router with a direct ethernet cable. I tried the WebClient example in the Ethernet library, changing the MAC and the IP, but when I open the Serial monitor I get this...

connecting...
connection failed

disconnecting.

I opened a shell and I wrote ifconfig, but I still couldn't see any IP or MAC addresses except those of my laptop (connected to router through ethernet cable).
I think my router can't recognize the shield, because I can't see it among "attached devices" and the LED on the router stays orange...