I just have gotten a laptop and I have a wireless card for it. Right now I am booting knoppix and saving the changes because the harddrive is only 1gb. On startup knoppix recognizes my card. How do I go about setting it up to talk with my router. So far I have found out I need to set up my ssid. How do I do this.

try man iwconfig, this tool is used to set up wireless cards, unless yours has a proprietary-only setup application.

well I've got that up but how do I change my ssid. And when there used to be windows on my laptop there was the D-Link air utility that was really nice because it had pretty graphs of signal strenght, etc. Is there something like this for linux?
Thanks

try :
iwconfig interface essid yourssid

interface being your card ( might be eth1, or wlan0 or whatever the driver decide to name it)

hope this help

ox

ox is correct, additionally, you may also try: iwconfig <device-name> essid any, which ought to work as well. If you've enabled WEP encryption (and you really should regardless of how easily cracked it is) you'll need to use: iwconfig key xxxx-xxxx-xx for 64 bit. Typing "man iwconfig" will give you all the other details as well.

To see your card's device-name, type iwconfig with no options, it should list the device as well as the essid of your access point/router. If iwconfig returns nothing or an error, your card will need a bit more work.

I have a D-Link dwl-650 (version 2, ADMtek chipset) and sadly, D-LInk does not support this card for Linux at all, so there's no supplied monitoring application as you asked about. There may be an open-source monitor that will work with your card, there may not. In the mean time you can simply type iwconfig and look at this line: Link Quality:95 Signal level:0 Noise level:0, it should give you some idea as to whether you're signal is ok. Notice on mine how the only field filled in is Link Quality. Some drivers support more info than others, if you post what driver you're using, maybe we can find some info on it.

ps: If you'd like your card to automatically config at bootup and when returning from a suspend, post your distro as well. (unless your distro is going to be knoppix).