I have made a new Knoppix on a USB drive (with virtual storage space /KNOPPIX-DATA on the same drive) and for a week or so it worked great. Then all of sudden wi-fi is not working. The nm-applet (network-manager) shows available wi-fi nodes and it appears to connect, but when I open up a browser and try to go anywhere it would not. I tried something like "ping www.google.com" and I get "no such host" or something like that. I thought first if network-manager is buggy especially since it is really designed for GNOME and not really for LXDE, thinking it might help if it were wicd.

I tried to manually connect to wi-fi, then the problem is that I get stuck at DHCPDISCOVER. I do not get the "lease" at all. So this may not even be a problem with network-manager.

The odd thing is, I have LinuxMint 9 LXDE edition on the same machine (EeePC 900) and it comes shipped with network-manager as well. I have no problem whatsoever with the network-manager on LinuxMint. And certainly this is not my hardware that is having problems, or the outcome would have been the same with LinuxMint or Knoppix.

So now I'm clueless as for why I cannot seem to get online with Knoppix. And this is kind of no good, since I am having intermittent problem with the faulty SSD on my EeePC and using Knoppix in case I am not able to boot from the SSD (this is just a temporary fix for another month or so before I get a new EeePC, probably 1005HAB.... but I still need a contingency plan in the meantime....).