Knoppix is designed with easy to use in mind but the current support on laptop and wireless LAN is still shaky, IMO. As anyone can see the trend that more and more new system will be laptop and the new networking of choice will be 802.1x, support for this setup needs to be boosted in the upcoming versions.

I understand that this is actually not a KNOPPIX problem but more the underlying Debian.

Why I am saying this ? I am still not able to run KNOPPIX properly on my DELL Inspiron and I read about problems for the Debian distribution and Inspiron too.