I found it for my feather install, I i have no idea yet if the same naming is used for dsl.
I gunzipped the feather minirt24.gz image, created an initrd directory , mounted the image there and opened the linuxrc file with a text editor (vim). searched down till I found
KNOPPIX_NAME="KNOPPIX"
the following line explained it all. The linuxrc script is reading the kernels /proc/cmdline to see if the cloop image of the system files have been renamed or a specific name should be used in place of the default KNOPPIX.
Adding the phrase "knoppix_name=FEATHER" and "knoppix_name=DSL" to the respective append lines in my lilo.conf file before running lilo (again for the 300th time) will hopefully cure this issue for me.
I'm getting ready to reboot and will post back , soon, if all goes well. If not I'll fix it from one of the other boot images on the harddive

It worked like a champ ! it rebooted back into dsl with my /KNOPPIX/KNOPPIX simlink pointing to /KNOPPIX/FEATHER.
I hope someone gets some good out of this . I certainly will.