This is not first article that I have read describing Kanotix as the ‘perfect’ distro. While I do not believe in such a thing, I am open to checking it out. From what I have heard thus far, it seems that much of the hoopla comes from the presence of Klik package management.

I expect both ease of use and advanced capabilities in any GNU/Linux distro. I am therefore hard to please when using a live CD-based distro, which is necessarily limited to about 2GB of software compressed onto a 700MB CD. I have tested more than a dozen live CD distros. Of all of them, Kanotix comes closet to being the “perfect distro.”

Simply put, Kanotix is Knoppix on steroids — lots of steroids:

1) Hardware recognition: The creator of Kanotix, Jörg Schirottke (a.k.a. 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.

2) Unionfs: 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. Of course, as with any modern live CD, Kanotix offers the capability to create a persistent home directory and to save all settings (network, printer, desktop files, etc.). Source: NewsForge

[tags]gnu,knoppix,kanotix,cd-based distro,klik[/tags]