Hi,

I'm still quite a newbie in Linux, although I'm slowly learning things. I've been using Knoppix on CD occasionally, but just recently I decided to repartition my hard drive (with a lot of work, since apparently some parts of my NTFS partition were corrupted) and did a HD-install of Knoppix 3.6 on my laptop, dual booting it with WinXP.

So far it's been absolutely great, but the one thing that still forces me to boot into WinXP is my wireless card, which is a Centrino-built-in Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG that isn't natively supported by Knoppix. I've searched the forums for answers, and it turns out that there is a driver under development at:

http://ipw2200.sourceforge.net/

However, because I'm still pretty inexperienced with Linux, the installation instructions completely baffle me. This is very unfortunate, because I would absolutely love it if I could use wireless Internet under Knoppix. I was wondering whether any of the Linux wizards out there could possibly demysitify the process of installing this driver into Knoppix, maybe into an easy-to-follow step-by-step process. I do have some experience with downloading sources to programs and building them, but even that doesn't always go flawlessly. If this driver could be supported in future Knoppix distributions (and due to the popularity of Centrino laptops, this would be a great addition, wouldn't it?), that would be great too.

I also have a related question. From what I've read about connecting wirelessly under Linux, it seems like you have to know the ID of the network you want to connect to. What I was wondering is if Linux also has a way of scanning nearby networks, like WinXP does? I guess this isn't a problem if you are connecting to a home network, but the university I go to has a main wireless network and smaller networks with different ID's limited to certain buildings that usually have better connectivity. I really don't like the idea of having to reboot into Windows to grab their ID's and reboot into Linux to connect to them. Can Linux natively support this feature as well?

Thanks in advance for any advice or suggestions.