Wireless mess! help please :(

Hey all,

Always been a closet linux fan (Read: Used to get voyeuristic pleasure from watching over other users shoulders) but after hearing about live cds i decided to bite down and blaze a noob trail. D/led a bunch of live dvds and the only one that worked for me was knoppix 4.0.2. so after successfully logging into the gui (and experiencing first hand the bliss that is kde) i discovered that my trusty stalwart i.e. my wireless connection was not up and running instantly. After having been mollycoddled by windows for years, i overcame the initial befuddlement, then i took stock and decided to read up about this stuff in various fiorums.

Ok. So i figured that my NIC was the problem. It apparently turned its back on the live dvd (though i burned it on a quality dvd, mind you, the pamapered lil nic #$#$) and refused to be recognised at all. I ran every one of the network related wizards and config tools. I did get some ping results from one of the said wizards, but i had a strong hunch that i was, in fact, pinging myself.( Primarily because i had all 0 ms return times). The one of the wizards told me that i had no wireless card.

This is a blatant lie. I have two wireless cards. One is pci based - a netgear 108 mbps wireless wg311T card. I do not have the first card installed under windows. I mean it just sits in the pci slot but i never installed the drivers for it. The other is a Trendnet Tew424Ub wireless usb adapter. This is my mainstay card and it runs just fine under windows. Neither of the cards were recognised. As for the second one, i believe the company does nto support linux for the model. I did find some potential backup drivers for it by third party dogooders, but i have no clue how to go about installing the drivers for it while in the live session (if at all i can).

I am about as noob as noob can get. I mean i understand some technical terms such as command prompt and the ilk, but otherwise i have used windows all my life. If someone cuold please point the way to a solution with noob friendly instructions, you will have converted one more long suffering windows user into a believer. Thanks ahead!

P.S. also another small query. I was wondering if theres an way to switch between kde and gnome appearance while using live dvd? I mean i know about gnoppix but i did see a gnome style control panel in the live session.. any way to switch between both on the go ? Sorry for putting it up here but i thought it was too small a question to merit a seperate post elsewhere. thanks.