Unfortunately, once installed to HD, there won't be an opportunity to enter boot cheat codes. In order to set the locale and language defaults to UK there is a whole lot of configuration files which need to be edited, and I am not sure I know what all of them are. On a live CD boot, Knoppix would have done all this automatically.

Anyway, to set the default x keyboard mapping to the UK keyboard, edit the file /etc/X11/xorg.conf (you will need root privileges for this) Find the line that says Option "XkbLayout" "us". Change it to Option "XkbLayout" "gb".

You should now get most applications using the UK keyboard. This can be easily tested with shift-3 which should show the sterling symbol.

This takes care of keyboard mapping in X. It does not take care of localisation to UK (which affects things like date formats and so on). I would suggest you search google for UK websites on the topic of localisation or setting the locale to the UK environment.

Regards.