The question below was related to the 8051 family as it has only the serial ports. Now when i found out that the ARM processors have inbuilt ethernet facility i decided to mov on to the ARM's. So which would be the Most easiest one to start of and as iam aware of keil environment i would like to work on anARM which supports keil .
Thnxx, Cheers.
The TI (formerly Luminary Micro) parts are easy to use. The eval kits are cheap and there is a lot of documentation on the Luminary Micro web site, including sample code. I've been using the LM3S6965 EVK for an ethernet project. The eval kits can be ordered with Keil, IAR, Codesourcery or Code Red compilers.
AT91 SAM series from Atmel is really popular between hobbyists and amateurs, you will find a lot of open source examples and excessive topics regarding this CPU's. And yes, they are widely supported in Linux community.
Check this out: http://www.at91.com