Apparantly, there is not an easier way....

After searching for "DRI", "OpenGL", and "nVidia" on the forums it has become apparant that fixing this is pretty involved. As far as I'm concerned, Knoppix is a great Demo/Rescue/Maintenance distribution. However, if I'm going to involve myself with mucking around to get DRI and OpenGL up and running on my GeForce2 Ti, I would rather just install Debian as opposed to remastering Knoppix or turn it into a hard drive install.

I will say this though, when I used Linux in the past I mostly went with FVWM2. KDE is really impressive by comparison. I'm anxious to check out Gnome and Ximian as well.