Text whizzing by too fast

[kl522]

I'm still baffled why I get a syntax error.

Which you should get to the bottom of it. That helps in your own understanding of the behavior of shell scripts. Mind you, shell scripts are not the most friendly animal, there are a lot of pitfalls which you should learn from this exercise.

[mecho]

The line you should enter in /etc/syslog-knoppix.conf for kern.log is :
kern.* -/var/log/kern.log
And I think syslog should expose everything that dmesg command does, you just remove the minus sign - in fron of it.
All log files are disabled because they interfere with the screen reader, at least that is what /etc/syslog-knoppix.conf says, but I don't think you use screen reader