OK, now I at least have a better understanding of the setup.

1 and 2 - I didn't understard that where you said that they gave you a router that it was actually a modem and router and that you had put aside your old modem. So this thakes several potential problems away.

I've looked over the link you gave, still can't find a manual for the router. Interesting that they set it up so it could only work on their system. I note that they say the NAT feature can be disabled, but it isn't in your case, answer 3 confirms that.

Just an observation, you only seem to get one ethernet port, so I suggest using a switch (or a hub) if you want to build a local network or give more than one computer access to the Internet at once.

3 - this looks good.

4 - hmm, the eth0 didn't show up at all here, I expected that it would, but as long as you don't get an error when you try to manually do a netcardconfig I'm not too concerned about that.

5 - Without knowing why DHCP is failing, doing the manual netcardconfig seem the next logical step. All of your input looks good. I don't know if that Nameserver (DNS) is valid, but I'll assume it is. If it's not them the symptom would be that you could access sites by the IP address but not by their URL.

OK, I have one suggested test to try at this point. It may sound strange, it should. But try the same thing using an IP address different from 192.168.1.2 for the computer's IP address. I know that the computer is being assigned that address in Windows, but there's an extremely slim chance that you could have a dhcp lease problem with that address (Which in no way explains why automatic DHCP is failing and really doesn't make any sense unless you know about a problem another user had about two years ago). But try putting in 192.168.1.10 or 192.168.1.100 and see if that works. I don't really have a lot of hope that this is going to fix anything, but I think it would be a shame not to try and then find out later that it was the problem.

And just to be real clear, when you did the ipconfig under windows, that was done on the same computer that we are trying to get Knoppix running on, right? We are not talking about two different computers here, are we?

6 - Well, at this point the data here looks right, although I want to fire up Linux and look at my interface's ifconfig to check a few things. Your hardware address sure has a lot of 00's in it, which is giving me some doubt. ifconfig is telling us that you're sending packets out but never getting anything back. And it doesn't seem to get any background chatter from the router, also strange. This leads me to a question that I should have asked but missed, and I don't think you've posted the answer yet. Just what is the NIC hardware that you're using to talk to the router? I'm wondering if it's some fancy NIC chipset that Knoppix isn't supporting yet. If it was I would have expected the manual netcardconfig to give an error, but it's the most obvious thing to ask at this point.

And there is only one ethernet port, right? You don't have a NIC card installed but also a NIC on your motherboard, do you? If you did it would be posiable that you are configuring eth0 but need to talk to eth1.

Assuming that you're running a normal supported 10/100 NIC that Knoppix should recognize, we need to determine just why the etho interface seems to be talking but never getting a response. To know that it would be helpful to see exactly what it's saying. There is a tool that will let us do just that, ethereal. I wrote up another entry on using it recently in this thread. You might want to read that thread through and then try capturing packets on the interface. We'll learn a lot by seeing if it's trying to access 192.168.1.1 when it should, and otherwise picking apart the packets to see how they differ from the windows packets that do get a response.

I would start ethereal even before trying to do a netcardconfig. Even the captured packets from answering yes to the dhcp question should tell us a lot. The packets for trying to access 192.168.1.1 with Konquror after doing the manual netcardconfig may tell us even more.

Hope that has given you more to think about and that maybe somewhere here I've stumbled across the answer.