I found that the tulip modules is not being loaded during intialization; I could 'modprobe tulip', and then '/sbin/ifconfig eth0 up' works (actually, I had to bring it down and use /sbin/ifup eth0 to get it both up and with an auto IP address).

I checked /etc/modules.conf and no alias or mention of 'eth0'. I saw the caution there to use 'update-modules'; did this and it added the alias to the modules files. I rebooted, but '/sbin/ifconfig' shows only interface lo active.

What is different about knoppix-debian init that the module is not getting loaded; shouldn't it be parsing /etc/modules.conf?