I don't have a DELL notebook, but I think there were problems when booting Knoppix with PCMCIA support.

On the second bootdisk in the etc directory is the PCMCIA configuration.
Maybe this could be changed to support the DELL notebook (e.g. exclude a memory range).
But this is just a guess.

The shell has no ls command, but you could try to use
Code:
echo *
This should work.

Bye
Jochen