Kanotix

The creator of Kanotix , Jörg Schirottke (Kano), based his distribution on the already excellent Knoppix, but he improved the hardware recognition with his own scripts, which are widely regarded as the most capable hardware recognition scripts currently on any distro. The first "Kanotix" premier was released at 24 December 2003 . In 2004 and 2005 Kanotix is a popular distribution Kanotix was one of the first distros to offer Unionfs, which makes it possible to install more applications even while running in the live CD mode (rather than after a hard drive install). Unionfs merges a filesystem in the RAM with the read-only filesystem available on the CD without ever touching a hard disk. The 2004 release is named "Bug Hunter". In 2006 the developers have serious problem with the stability and "Kano" decides to move from Debian Sid to a less volatile basis. In October 2006 the developers are leaving the Kanotix Project and start working on sidux , another Debian Linux Distribution. The latest release is in 2007, then Kanotix rebased from Debian Sid to Debian Etch. After the Debian-Etch-Release in April 2007 Kanotix was no longer compatible with Debian Sid. So Howto was given "Step by Step" for a distribution upgrade. After 3 months of development and several beta Releases the new Kanotix-2007-Thorhammer-RC6 is publicly available for download. The current version is Kanotix-2007-Thorhammer-RC7, which contains Linux 2.6.24. Kanotix-Thorhammer is now the only supported version. Kano's scripts e.g. to install the 3D - nvidia- and fglrx- drivers and the packages of the VDR-software or new kernel (2.6.27-11; 2.6.28-3) are updated too.
 Live CD
Live CD with advanced hardware detection. The Live CD can run from the drive and you will be able to use your computer's full performance without touching the hard drive. The live mode allows you to work without any installation , and it is possible to set up a "/home" directory on a FLASH Drive where you can save your configuration , settings and even installed applications. The Live CD can be used not only to install Kanopix on your Hard Drive, It also can be used to update previously installed version. It doesn't have different versions for a Live CD and a Hard Drive install.
 Cheat Codes
There are also available cheat codes for cheating the Kanopix CD you can boot it from an image ( *.iso ) file stored on a FLASH Drive , and free up the CD Drive , so you will be able to use it! he Kanotix.iso can be booted with the cheatcode "fromiso=/(path)/" from Hard Disk or FLASH Drive , which is of course much faster than booting from CD.
 Software
The Kanopix distro supports around 1 300 packages... and the little amount of packages that are not in the CD can be easily downloaded and installed. It is one of very few distros that preinstalls klik, a utility that makes it easy to install applications with one click from within a browser (a newbie's dream come true). offers a choice of two firewalls, the Kanotix firewall and Firestarter. Connectivity with GPRS, Bluetooth, DSL, ISDN, Wi-Fi, and modem are all included. The default Desktop enviroment is KDE with included OpenOffice.org , Scribus, the GIMP, Qcad, XMMS, Audacity, VLC, and many others. Kanotix is based on KDE and features amaroK, Konqueror, Kaffeine, K3b, and the rest of the huge suite of KDE tools. Although Konqueror is the default browser, Firefox is also available. Kanotix makes for a fantastic rescue and data recovery tool. With Kanotix one can create, resize, or delete partitions with QTparted, write to NTFS with the new captive NTFS driver capability, look for a rootkit with chkrootkit, change the admin password on a Windows XP machine with chntpw, check and repair a corrupted filesystem with, in the case of a ReiserFS, reiserfsck. The Kanotix Website has good documentation, including a user's manual in PDF format and a forum where knowledgeable contributors answer questions, usually with 24 hours.