The system finally finished booting-up, after 6 hours.

Now I'm re-booting to see if it will occur again, and it's definitely S L O W -- now it's stuck on:

Starting internet superserver: inetd.

I think once it boots up I'll just install Debian, without Knoppix. and I figured out I was running Linux mythtv 2.6.11.9-chw-2