Curtybob, about Knoppix, I've tried it and it works perfectly fine
There was NO tinkering involved on my part, I didn't even need to use the command line once, it was just up and running. Also, my ADSL connection was recognized after running a nifty utility in the program menu all I had to do for internet functionality was supply a user name and password
But the results may vary vastly with different hardware, good luck and tell me how it goes