Finally, after having Knoppix, a laptop and a wireless card, after two years I can finally connect to my wireless router with Knoppix 3.8.1. I'm even able to set a WEP key and still have it work, and I'm not using a "wrapper".

For anyone interested I'm using a Belkin 802.11b pcmcia card on an HP ze4240 motebook and connecting to a Dlink router. I have to do two manual setups, first the wavelan configuration utility. Then I have to go back and do a netcardconfig on the same interface and let it pull the DHCP settings from the router. Once that happens I'm on-line. Haven't yet tried to save configuration information to a flash drive, but that's on the to-do list.

So finally getting to the question: I'm connecting, but the connection is marginal. That's not unusual, it's marginal from the room that the notebook is currently in from Windows too. In Windows I have indications of the signal strength and signal quality (part of the vendor supplied software for the card). In Knoppix once I run the wavelan configuration utility the lights on the pcmcia card stop blinking and come on solid (a good sign), but nothing seems to be running to give me an indication of signal quality or other information. Is there a tool I should be running for this? Is it in Knoppix or do I have to download it, and if the latter, can you provide a link? I've tried running airsnort, but it doesn't look like it would provide signal quality information. And it doesn't seem to work with this card, it just sits there, and it should see my own SSID (that the only wireless signal I'll see from inside the house).