It's a piece of cake:
  • 1) Don't use hardware that requires special drivers and only makes a windows driver. For example, avoid special ADSL modems with lame (and low throughput) USB interfaces only.

    2) Use a router. This is extremely important for safe Internet access, and will resolve all of your setup problems for you.

    3) Use a normal 10/100 wired NIC. If you insist on using something else, either confirm that Knoppix has the drivers or wait without complaining until it does, or contribute to the effort by resolving the driver issue for everyome. But reaistically, making drivers when the manufacturer will not release specs for the hardware is a problem, so supporting manufacturers who make hardware with Win only drivers and then bad mouthing Linux because you made bad choices doesn't help anyone except Bill Gates.

    3) If you follow the abouve advice and have a ethernet ADSL modem, a router (I have several that I paid less than $10 each for), and a normal NIC you can do what I do; boot Knoppix and you are on the network and Internet with absolutely no setup at all. And very little setup is then required to use a supported wireless card.