Hi Wayne
I know what you are trying to do and no you cannot install on your machine with out making a separate partition. But with the use of a program like Partition Magic from PowerQuest you will be able to change the size of your current partition and then install Knoppix on the rest. I suggest you ask around one of you friend at school might have a copy that you can use. You will need around 500 meg partition for swap and 5 gig for the knoppix in stall. You can use the Lilo boot loader to select witch operating system you want to use at start up. This may be the answer you are looking for but what ever you do BACK UP YOUR DATA before you mess with your partition. I did the above operation on an XP laptop and it worked great.
Later