...and a manual config seems to be an equal crapshoot.

So Windows is all FUBAR'd on my roommate's laptop and won't boot, but booting to Knoppix I can get to his hard drive and all his documents are still there. He has ~15 GB of data he would like to pull off and save, so burning CDs is not a desirable option. This leaves ethernet. I'm short on a crossover cable, so I borrowed my friend's D-Link router. I connect my Mac to it and it DHCPs to give me 192.168.0.100. It shows 192.168.0.1 as the gateway. Cool.

So I go to connect my roommate's laptop running Knoppix, and I can't get an IP for the life of me. I run the netcardconfig for both DHCP and manual settings, but I can't get any sort of a connection. I've tried setting things up manually with ifup/ifdown and ifconfig, still no dice. I've tried booting knoppix with the noapic option as well, but that didn't help.

I'm lost at this point. My roommate's laptop won't even DHCP to our university network under Knoppix. I'm a Mac guy, so maybe I'm missing something on the Linux side, but I've read all the documentation I can find and I can't seem to figure out what I'm doing wrong.