Jack,

I'm still not following what the problem is here, but my first guess is that you may be using some strange NIC that the driver for was in older versions of Knoppix but removed from the 5.x versions. Someone may be able to verify this if you post just what your hardware NICs are. Alternately, if you are in a position to swap out your NIC and use something very standard, you might find the system starts working.

I'm not clear on the static address issue either. Are you trying to get a static address set up for some reason, or are you just saying that DHCP failed and you tried to set up addresses manually and that failed also? Of course, if Knoppix lacks the driver for your NIC then both will fail. If it's not a driver issue then it may also help to tell us what router you are using; make, model and firmware revision.

That DSL works (I believe you are talking about Damn Small Linux, not high speed access from the phone company) would imply that older versions of Knoppix might have the drivers in it. DSL-N is (by definition) not DSL, so it isn't unreasonable that DSL-N might lack some drivers that DSL does.