I've been poking around very heavily with KNOPPIX recently, and it's made me think a bit about my favorite mini-distros of Linux. So, here's my top 4:
KNOPPIX ( http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html ) It's been discussed before, so I'll be brief. Excellent autodetection, slick packaging, slightly hampered by the CD-only format. Recent versions allow other computers to boot KNOPPIX via network. Timo's Rescue CD ( http://rescuecd.sourceforge.net/ ) My CD-based distro of choice before I spotted KNOPPIX. It's much leaner, focussing only on recovery tools, though it still has an SSH server, the SAMBA client and smbfs, and CD burning out of the box. If you have enough RAM, it can load itself into memory and free up the CDROM drive, and there's also a trimmed version for business-card-sized CDRs. tomsrtbt ( http://www.toms.net/rb/ ) Probably the most famous of all floppy-based distros, it's also very conservative; for instance, it only recently started using a 2.2 kernel. Still, there's an amazing amount packed into that one floppy. You have PCMCIA support, the popular network and SCSI card drivers, enough network utilities for diagnostics, and even some scripts for unpacking .deb and .rpm files. Loads entirely into RAM, and can self-build (but not self-compile). Zdisk ( http://www.tux.org/pub/people/kent-robotti/looplinux/rip/ ) It's not so much a floppy-based distro, as it is a toolkit for creating your own floopy-based distro. It allows you to substitute any kernel you'd like, and the root filesystem is relatively easy to tinker with. HJ Hornbeck
