Knoppix 5.0.1 finds the Atheros wireless chip in my Lenovo Thinkpad x60s laptop, but the madwifi driver croaks with a message something like "hardware returned unexpected value" and wireless is unusable. Here is the lspci -v for the Atheros chip:

03:00.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications, Inc. AR5212 802.11abg NIC (rev 01)
Subsystem: IBM Unknown device 058a
Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 66
Memory at edf00000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64K]
Capabilities: [40] Power Management version 2
Capabilities: [50] Message Signalled Interrupts: 64bit- Queue=0/0 Enable-
Capabilities: [60] Express Legacy Endpoint IRQ 0
Capabilities: [90] MSI-X: Enable- Mask- TabSize=1

I find that if I build my own madwifi driver using the current top of tree madwifi-ng driver from www.madwifi.org that the driver works fine. I suppose it's something about the newer version of the chip going in the new thinkpads. Maybe newer madwifi code can be used in a future rev of knoppix?

Other than the problem with the wireless chip, knoppix 5.0.1 works great on the x60 thinkpad. I put it on a USB flash drive and it boots great.

jeff