Hi for those that don't know,

Knoppix 5.3.1 DVD 2008-03-en.iso 4.1GB has arrived a super live DVD as usual,
with the 0wn "zero work" installer thrown in.
This works much better than ye olde knoppix-installer and still starts in the terminal window of the live DVD.
note 0(is number Zero)wn must be entered as such.
Post install , language on boot of all hdd installs default to Deutsch (lang=de)
One must edit the grub menu.lst file.
/boot/grub/menu.lst as root with text vim, emacs or GUI as Kate, kedit etc.
Change lang=de to lang=us or whatever, and this fixes language problems.
Initially you will get Kate etc auf Deutsch, but it is not too hard..

There are some other kernel complaints
dpkg: serious warning: files list file for package `cloop-utils' missing, assuming package has no files currently installed.

K3b complains
System locale charset is ANSI_X3.4-1968
Your system's locale charset (i.e. the charset used to encode filenames) is set to ANSI_X3.4-1968. It is highly unlikely that this has been done intentionally. Most likely the locale is not set at all. An invalid setting will result in problems when creating data projects.
Solution: To properly set the locale charset make sure the LC_* environment variables are set. Normally the distribution setup tools take care of this.

So Knoppix 0wn HDD installer, after a few tweaks is getting to productive hdd install stage, and may be better than Debian itself before too long.
Best
El Zorro