I too have installed Knoppix and it worked fine but that is not the point here. The point is that you and alot of other people cannot do something as simple as build a new kernel. That's more than enough of a problem for me to know that Knoppix was not meant to be installed. The fact that there are install scripts means nothing.
Lol, is that an insult? I'm not one of those guys that has used linux since the 386 days, but I have been using it since Red Hat 5.2 - it's been my primary platform every since. I'm not what you'd call a newbie

I've compiled many a' kernel, and have made plenty of custom Knoppix disks. Knoppix is currently my preferred distro.

In this case, it's either some weird fluke, or I'm losing my mind. I start with pre-partitioned hard drive (in other words, I don't use the script for this), swap as the first partition (for speed), hda2 as the knoppix partition. I run the script, choose hda2, choose Debian style, no boot disk and away it goes.

Once done, I reboot, log in as myself, open a shell, update the sources, apt-get install kernel-2.6.6, remove the linux symlink, untar, edit the Makefile to give it the kernel a unique name, make the new symlink, make mrproper, and then make xxxconfig and it FAILS!

These are precisely the steps that I do and in that order. It's either something really odd, or really stupid - it's not a "noob" issue. This is my first attempt at compiling 2.6.6, so I guess in that sense, it's "new"...

As for Katonix, I'll look into it.