Quote Originally Posted by catfish
I started ethereal while ping was running and the only packets it displayed were ARP requests (for the "pinged" IP).
Sure sounds like what I was seeing when my NIC stopped working. Ethereal on the Knoppix system still saw the ARP packets. Indeed they were coming in and the NIC would see all packets, but since the switch never got any response from Knoppix it didn't know it was there and, being a switch, it never sent anything else down the ethernet cable to the knoppix system, just the occasional arp packet in case something did connect and wanted to ID itself. I put a hub in the line and then I was able to watch traffic to and from the other computers on the hub. Also, in my case, ethereal would report outbound packets, but they were never really going out. I could prove that by watching from another computer on the hub with ethereal and seeing that the wire stayed quiet from my Knoppix system.

Sorry that the mii-tool -r trick isn't working for you, seems to help some but not others. Also, it works for me with Knoppix but not with Morphix, which seems strange since Morphix claims to be a Knoppix rebuild with different packages installed. (Of course, I don't know for sure that you even have the same problem, but it seems very likely). I did come across one other way that I could get my NIC working under Knoppix, by using the expert option at boot. This also may not work for you, but seems worth a try. See the message I posted in Evidence WinXP "security updates" may break Linux
 for the details.