The good news is you do not need to disconnect a Prism2 device on boot up, then connect and run the initialization routine. It was a major pain in the butt having to disconnect/reconnect this device.

My device is a Dell Truemobile 1180, prism2 chipset connected to a PIII dual booting XP and Knoppix 3.3 (on HD). I believe this will work with any prism based wireless device.

The bad news is that I still must run the initialization before I can connect to the web. The initialization from a root console is:

modprobe prism2_usb prism2_doreset=1
wlanctl-ng wlan0 lnxreq_ifstate ifstate=enable
wlanctl-ng wlan0 lnxreq_autojoin ssid=<whatever your ssid is> authtype=opensystem
ifconfig wlan0 <your ip address>
netcardconfig

netcardconfig asks if it is OK to do a dhcp broadcast. Click "yes" and if successful returns an OK and indicates "auto lo wlan0". I found that you must do the netcardconfig broadcast or this will not work.

You do not need to leave the console window running. I did not make any alteration to existing .conf files, but did note that my resolv.conf file had the correct settings for DNS resolution in the form:

search ne2.client2.attbi.com
nameserver 63.240.76.19
nameserver 204.127.198.19

which matches my router settings. You should check and/or create this file first or only valid IP addresses will work in the browser.

Fire up your browser of choice and away you go. I'm typing this now from a wireless connection to my router without having to disconnect the 1180 first.

Now for the neat trick...this noob needs some help. How do you create a script that will run the initialization on booting Knoppix?