Thanks to the helpful posts of Miilltek, Shah, and Kelmo, I am proud to say that I have successfully installed the NVIDIA drivers under 2.6.6. I am going to quickly put all the instructions and some clarifications so that newbs like me can also make this work.

I will use http://knoppix.net/forum/viewtopic.p...4f7083a3639b31 as the core of this guide. I will just fix up some typos and try to explain what's going on with my limited knowledge of linux.

su
cd /usr/src (you need to start here. I had problems because I started in root)
wget ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kerne...-2.6.6.tar.bz2
cp linux-2.6.6.tar.bz2 /usr/src
tar jxvf linux-2.6.6.tar.bz2 (check to see if these files have been put into /usr/src)
rm -f linux
ln -s linux-2.6.6 linux
cp /boot/config-2.6.6 linux/.config
cd linux/include
ln -s asm-i386 asm
cd .. (again, check to see if linux-2.6.6 is in the folder usr)
make oldconfig
patch -p1 <../knoppix-kernel26.patch
cd /usr/bin
rm -f gcc (the kernel image was compiled with gcc-2.95 but symlink is to gcc-3.3)
ln -s gcc-2.95 gcc
cd /usr/src
make (this will compile your kernel, will take sometime to finish- on my 2.4 around 1 hour)

apt-get update
apt-get install nvidia-kernel-common nvidia-kernel-source
tar zxvf nvidia-kernel-source.tar.gz
cd modules/nvidia-kernel
debian/rules KSRC=/usr/src/linux-2.6.6 KVERS=2.6.6 kdist_image
cd ..
dpkg -i nvidia-kernel-2.6.6_1.0.5336-6_i386.deb
apt-get install nvidia-glx
cd /usr/bin (typo here)
rm -f gcc
ln -s gcc-3.3 gcc

Edit /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 :

Drivers Section
Replace "nv" with "nvidia"

Modules Section
Remove or comment out lines including "dri" and "GLCore"
Ensure there is a line with Load "glx"

Hopefully I added just a miniscule amount of polish; I think most people will now be able to use these instructions without having to play around too much/meet troubles.

On a side note, my glxgears fps jumped from 290 to 1560ish... how acceptable is 1560 for a Geforce 2 MX200 PCI 32 MB card?