RUNNING from the HD, rather than installing, or CD boot?

[Markp.com]

There's a cheatcode for that too: mem=???M

Yeah, I found that... so my start line now reads:
knoppix mem=119M bootfrom=/dev/hda1/knoppix

and that starts to boot fine, then all of a sudden tells me I don't have enough memory to run, so boots me into X11 rather than KDE.

The error message is: "xmessage: Not enough memory to start kde! (Atleast 82MB required.)"

When my system starts up and does a memory count, it says I have 119MB of memory (so thats what I put in to the command prompt) the boot can't be using more than 30MB of memory can it?!

The full system spec is P800, (I thought I had 256MB of ram! But I guess not) 119M and its a laptop, if you didn't read that above

Any ideas on how I can get the laptop to boot into KDE?