Hi, all,
I decided to finally try Linux and downloaded a live CD of Knoppix and booted it up. I'm running a wireless card which it sees as eth1 but whenever I try to do anything in Konsole it tells me "operation not permitted" "permission denied" etc. I tried "ifconfig eth1 up dhcpd eth1" and "iwconfig eth1 essid linksys."

Basically, it is seeing the card as eth1 but I cannot figure out how to get it to connect to the wireless network two other laptops are on.

Looking at my other laptop, it says IP etc was assigned via DHCP broadcast, however when I use network card configuration it says operation failed when I say for it to use DHCP broadcast.

Thank you so much for the help.

Are you running the commands as root? Knoppix has a kind of funny system in that if you just pop open a console, you aren't root. However, you can su to root without a password and I think in the Knoppix menu there is a root console.

I believe you can also find root on the tty's (hit Ctrl-Alt-F2 or similar). That's the quickest way for me (but you can't do copy&paste without gpm).

Hey, guys,

In doing iwconfig it says it is using a BroadCom chipset which apparently isn't supported in Linux. I think that's why it isn't working.

Broadcom is supported in Linux, it is just that the driver is still being developed and has issues. The driver is called bcm43xx and it is on the Knoppix 5.01 disk, but I'm not sure that the proper firmware files are. I briefly tried Knoppix 5.01 on laptop (which has a Broadcom 4308 chip) and while the card was recognized, it didn't work. I haven't had time to investigate just why yet.

I think knoppix also has ndiswrapper installed, however you would need to supply the Windows driver for that to work.

I burned my Knoppix disc maybe two days ago so it's the newest version. It sounds like you're having the same issue I am. It is recognized as eth1 but doesn't work. Although I didn't get it to work in Ubuntu either.

The problem is that Broadcom refuses to support Linux, so all Linux distros have the same problem with Broadcom based cards. I've gotten mine to work on my Slackware box, but it definitely was a bit of a pain. However, I've never gotten Knoppix to use it. The latest version does recognize that there is a card there, but neither bcm43xx or ndiswrapper seem to be able to deal with it.