I guess I missed the humor since I have been so intent on getting this to work, sorry.
The live CD I was using was Atmission. Today I put Knoppix in the drive and booted, went right to the network set up used dhcp and was surfing the web in a minute! Used the 3C 574- TX pccard network card. I am about to agree with your hypothesis - it must be me since Fedora will work with the 3C net card, but that can't be since I am a common factor in all the tests!, so it must be the Linksys card, but the 3C card did not work with Fedora after the first time.
It just defies my understanding. I don't know what you would like to know that "Knoppix said", it just seemed to work normally. It complained a couple of times in browsing with Konqueror, but the Mozilla browser worked in those cases. It did not do well with printing, but all of my printers are networked Windows things, so that probably is asking a little too much without further fussing.

I was interest in the results of the hardware detection by Knoppix, esp. what it said your NIC is & which modules it loaded. The info is often transferrable to other distros.

Note: "knoppix 2" at the Knoppix boot prompt is supposed to go to CLI mode -- no waiting for the GUI to load.