I got knoppix to run to some degree on my Micron XPe, P166 32Mb RAM, 2Gb HDD by using the knoppix noscsi option. However the splashscreen still screwed up my video.

I've real success with feather linux (knoppix remaster) vesa, 800x600 16bit depth, on this machine. you might try that with the same options. BTW nousb and noagp free up a shade of memory.