To the best of my knowledge Knoppix does not contain all the ALSA libraries on the liveCD that are necessary to configure and detect the midi ports.

Rosegarden2 (which uses OSS, the default for knoppix) uses OSS not ALSA, and requires MIDI to be of much use.

So if I can figure out how to get the midi ports configured on a knoppix liveCD I will contribute a midi howto for this site.