5.0.1 Linksys WMP54G (rt2500) booting weirdness

Hi,

Not sure if this should be put in the Booting and Hardware or Networking forum, so if it's in the wrong place, my apologies.

I have a copy of 5.0.1 to try out just for kicks. I already have Windows XP SP2 and Ubuntu Dapper Drake 6.06.1 on the hard drive where I am booting Knoppix. As stated elsewhere by other people in other forums, botting hangs at the DHCP broadcasting portion of the boot process with no cheat codes, and at the Starting X session with the nodhcp cheatcode. I get something similar to this message:

udevd - event[3258]: wait for sysfs: waiting for 'sys/class/net/eth0/device/driver' failed

I tried every cheatcode I could think of, including noudev, noapic, expert, and debug. Same thing. Except for one cheatcode: failsafe. The failsafe boot generates the error above but charges ahead with the boot process anyway and gives me access to KDE (yay!). However, I don't have any sound, and the mouse does not work. And of course, the network card does not work either.

My question is, is there a way to get the network card to work now that I have access to KDE with a failsafe session? I noticed that the rt2500 module appears to be loaded, but not sure how to activate it. Thanks!

Take care,
Russ