why cant i enter a wep encryption key
 

I have a dlink pcmcia card and am trying to connect to my home network (i know this works fine as my windows laptop is on it constantly) however i am having trouble getting linux to connect. The card appears to be seen by knoppix but i cant enter the key. Is there a special way to enter it separating hex with commas or something it is a 5 part hex key and i cant figure how to enter it. This is probably an obvious question to most but im a complete newbie if i can get this to work i can switch to linux fully and learn more. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Did you start the key with 0x to indicate that the string is in hex?

key starts with 45 do i need to do something to tell it its hex?

Probably. Try putting "0x" in front of your key when you enter it, without any following spaces, and then the whole rest of your key, i.e "0x45...". If that doesn't work, what are you using to configure your card, the built-in Knoppix graphical configure tools or "iwconfig" in the terminal?

This didnt work, it still wont connect to the network. I enter the SSID and the code starting with 0x but nothing changes it doesnt connect and I am stuck. Anyone have any other ideas.

I'm having a similar problem in all the distros that I try...