I made some notes of the steps I took to configure my knoppix 3.8.1 install. Some of it might not be helpful, but some stuff seemed like general problems that other people are running into. Please feel free to add more input, and other solutions you might have.

*lines added to /etc/apt/sources.list
deb ftp://ftp.nerim.net/debian-marillat testing main
deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian testing main contrib non-free
then run:
#apt-get update

NVIDIA drives:
The nvidia driver install was a little confusing, and I kept on running into problems, causing the process to fail. Somehow I eventually got it to work. As far as I could piece together, these were the steps that worked for me, but maybe I've left something out, or have some extra steps?
#apt-get install kernel-source
-choose the kernel source you want. I went with 2.6.11 because thats what knoppix is currently using, and it was the most current release
#apt-get install nvidia-kernel-source
#cd /usr/src
*for me, the linux dir in /usr/scr was a symlink to linux-2.6.11. both dirs were empty
#rm -rf linux*
#tar -xvzf kernel-source-2.6.11.tar.bz2
#ln -s kernel-source-2.6.11 linux
#cp /boot/config-2.6.11 /usr/src/linux/.config
*Im not sure if this step is needed..
#cd linux
$sudo make xconfig
*again, dont think this step is needed..
#make-kpkg modules_image
#cd /usr/src
#dpkg -i nvidia-kernel-2.6.11_1.0.7174-3+10.00.Custom_i386.deb
*theres a chance your filename will be different then this, but the main parts are nvidia-kernel*.deb
#apt-get install nvidia-glx
*Last thing left to do is change the driver to "nvidia" in /etc/X11/XF86Config-4, and reboot to see if everything worked.

LILO:
edit /etc/lilo.conf
remove reference to scsi=hda etc [scsi emulation is no longer needed, but cd drives will not mount with this]
run 'lilo' to commit changes to lilo.conf

DVD playback:
#apt-get install libdvdcss2
symlink dvd player to /dev/dvd, eg:
#ln -s /dev/cdrom /dev/dvd
I think the system does this for you by default, but I have multiple dvd drives, so I changed it to my preferred drive[/code]