Quote Originally Posted by WelshBluebird
well after trying a few cheat codes, I've got it to boot. First into text mode, then I tried booting into the normal mode. While doing this it actually 'saw' my hard drive and let me make a swap file on it.
However, Knoppix boots, but doesn't get further than showing the background. So I see the default desktop background, but nothing else.
It might help if you told us which cheat codes that you used. I've run Knoppix on an old 166mhz 64 meg system and it is painfully slow (and I haven't even tried it with recent versions). Your 32 megs of ram is certainly a major issue here and may just be too little to hope to run the GUI in (yes, Linux has suffered much of the same bloat that other systems have; I managed a University system several years ago that ran sixty or more interactive users in far less memory, whithout a GUI, of course). There are other less memory intensive graphical interfaces than KDE; you might consider looking for a Live CD with one of those, or even install Debian or another Linux distro and use a small GUI (if you use one at all).