I think your question now relates to permissions in konsole after installing a new kernel. I may be wrong, but think this is a kde issue, so to proe this create a new user and login to kde.

Regarding nvidia, with knoppix 5.11 I used apt-get update , then apt-get install nvidia-kernel (and dependencies which took me back to a slightly earlier kernel 2.6.18-4) but Nidia works, and beryl, no problems.

I agree with you, for a live distribution, knoppix has some pretty powerful features, it also comes into its own
as a repair disk for windoze, having write capility for ntfs, I have used it many times for data recoery on windows systems, and for repair.