Quote Originally Posted by Kman
I'm still in the days of Windows 98. I see others are having similar problems. I do hope we can find the cure for this. Thanks for your help. Forgive my ignorance, but where do I input the netcardconfig command to see if it'll work ? At startup or once Knoppix has loaded? And how about manually configuring the card? Thanks.
Striker2002 reports that he's seen it on a Win98 system. It would be reasonable, if it is M$ doing this, which is not proved even though things point that way, to assume that they are finding ways to do it with all flavors of their system. Also, if you have installed a recent version of Media Player, the fine print in the "click through licencising agreement" pretty much says you give them the right to disable any software on your system they want, M$ software or other software. It does not, however, give them the right to damage your hardware, which changing an eeprom to bad values does.

On pinging: tell us what you have on your system. You first post said DSL still works fine on my winblows 98 box so it sounds like you have a local network. Guess you could be plugging and unplugging computers into your DSL modem, or that "windows 98 box" might even be the same computer without the Knoppix CD, but it would help greatly to know if you have a DSL router like the Linksys installed. This would make it easy to ping a local device (the router itself would be a good first target). If you don't have one, then do a traceroute to any URL while in Windows and note the first couple of IP addresses you see and try to ping them under windows. You should be able to ping them under Knoppix as well, but this does involve a lot more things working (like logging into your DSL account) than is involved with pinging a local router. In fact, given the current low cost of these devices, I would suggest getting one even if you had only 1 computer on your DSL connection. It gives a lot more utility in working with the network and it gives you an extra hardware firewall (there are some issues with a few applications like NetMeeting, but overall the extra security is worth it).

As to where to input netcardconfig: Fire up a shell (little icon on the bottom set of tools with a shell in a window). Type netcardconfig. You'll see it brings up a utility to configure your network card. This same utility is available in the menus, but I don't recall exactly what you go through and don't have Knoppix running at the moment. But you'll need the shell anyway if you need to reset the card (sudo mii-tool -r and then netcardconfig).