Quote Originally Posted by hardawayd
I am having trouble getting knoppix on usb to connect to the internet. Can someone tell me if knoppix has the ipw2200 firmware necessary for my dell laptop centrino wireless chip to work?
I don't know about that chip, but I doubt it. The problem with firmware is that it is copyrighted. So, Knoppix can't distribute it. For a CD-based live distro like Knoppix, this really sucks, because you will have to remaster the CD yourself or download the firmware each time you boot up the CD. That's just one of the many problems with binary-only firmware.

http://ipw2200.sourceforge.net/firmware.php?fid=5
(big ugly licence agreement here)

Since you have a USB key, this will be slightly easier, because you can just copy the firmware file to your USB key and load it from there each time.

Unfortunately, it is very hard to find "clean" 802.11g cards: chipsets that don't require firmware or ndiswrapper in order to run. There are some reverse-engineered drivers that don't require firmware, but they tend to be unstable, as the reverser doesn't have enough information to understand the device fully and make a truly reliable driver (ACX111, Broadcom).

The only card I have found so far, that has both a manufacturer-supported Linux driver and no firmware/ndiswrapper requirement, is RaLink. Are there any others?