I just bought a Knoppix 3.3 bootable CD. I set my BIOS to boot from cd. It started to come up, I'm not clear on error message because I started to smell hot electronics, So I shut everything down. The smell was coming from my monitor. Now I see a requirement is svga My PC is setup for vga 800 by 600. I've seen many boot options for vga....which should I try and how do I do that. Now I'm a little paranoid about booting this CD.

boot: fb800x600 is what i had to use on two seperate puters or the screen was unreadable..... control alt backspace is the shutdown command

My screen was readable...just looked like a pin cushion and then of course I smelled the monitor getting hot. Could this burn up my graphic card and/or my monitor ? How do I input boot options ? Can I do that from the initial knoppix screen ?

It's more likely to damage your monitor than vga card. You can input boot options right at the beginning of the boot process, where you would normally either press enter or wait a few seconds for it to start booting. As well as fb800x600, try typing: knoppix vga=ask