I was using Knoppix 4 and I had no problem with getting online with my laptop wireless card (Found as eth1 in Knoppix 4) I have upgraded to knoppix 5 LiveCD and now my wireless card shows up as ath0. But netcardconfig does not see ath0. I found the following online

10. Madwifi modules are back in 3.8.2 but netcardconfig doesn't work with Atheros network devices ath* (ex. ath0). Solution: change line 73 of netcardconfig from NETDEVICES="$(cat /proc/net/dev | awk -F: '/eth.tr.wlan.:/{print $1}')" to NETDEVICES="$(cat /proc/net/dev | awk -F: '/eth.tr.wlan.ath.:/{print $1}')" adding |ath.: save file in your home directory and run from there.
I tried that with no success. By using the KWifiManager I get full signal strength and it shows the name of my network. My IPadress is unavailable. And I'm unable to ping any computers on my network. then I used 'ifconfig ath0 192.168.1.xxx' to set an IP address. I can now ping the other computers and see the share folder with Samba. But I still have no Internet access. I've tried all this with my WEP turn on and also with is turn off just to be sure that it was not causeing any problem. I'm new to linux and this is the extent of what I know on the subject and need help moveing on. Any help is appreciated.

Thanks