I have just been working with this, and have found, for my specific case that wireless through the ndiswrapper can still work, if done properly. information on what I did is as follows:

system: hp pavillion zv5000
memory: 512MB
wireless card: Broadcom BCM4306 802.11b/g Wireless LAN Controller
wireless router: linksys wrt54gl
firmware: v4.30.5, Apr. 27, 2006
wireless mode: mixed

disk: 100GB, 3 partitions, hda1 = /; hda2 = swap; hda3 = /home

notes:

I was not able to make bcm43xx work. It seems to fire up and connect, i.e. gets dhcp info, but can not do any thing farther. It seems that there is a one line kernel patch associated with 2.6.19.2 that speaks to this issue. I tried to make this work, by doing an hd (debian type) install, and then work with the kernel patch - but was not successful. Not enough time to pursue that farther. It has been a long time since I have built kernels. However, was able to finally make ndiswrapper to work.

Before I removed microsoft from this machine, I found the wireless driver information and copied that to my hda3 disk partition.


procedure:

boot knoppix 5.1.1 dvd screen=1280x800

open terminal window - issue su - command
mount the hda3 disk partition

#for general purposes:

rmmod bcm43xx

# need MS devide drivers - a variety of sources - bcmwl5a.inf, bcmwl5.sys
#
# in my case, wireless device fairly consistently comes up as eth2

cd to the directory on the hda3 drive where these are stored

ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5a.inf
modprobe ndiswrapper
ifup wlan0

Now, there are a number of more complete discussions about ndiswrapper and how to carry forward the installation to make things more permenant. These can be found in this forum in other places, or a google search on knoppix and ndiswrapper.

As a follow on note, this information is for the live dvd only.

I tried to do an HD install (knx2hd), following the above procesure, but the wireless setup info was not successfully preserved, and I have not figured a way round that yet. (This was the approach that I had used with an HD install of 4.0.2 and it worked great for that version). About the only thing that I can say is that I am understanding more, why the tools need to be re-written.


Finally, the drawback here is that since I was unable to either do an HD install, or to save the system configuration information, this procedure needs to be done each time knoppix 5.1.1 is loaded.

While this information is specific to my case, some of the ideas may be helpful to others.

Good Luck!