Also I read that when Knoppix installs it does so on one partition. Does it not install :/, swap, usr and home ?
you read correctly, knoppix_installer and the older installer only install Knoppix to a single partition. That means, /, /usr, /home, /etc, etc are all installed to one partition. If you already have a swap partition, it'll use that but everything else goes in one partition. If you installed Mandrake, you might remember that you had the abillity to select other partitions for parts of your OS installation. Many will put /home and /usr/local on there own partition since they tend to be the more "dynamic" parts of the OS filesystem.