PC Magazine has a new feature in the June 7 edition called DIY (for Do It Yourself). The first DIY:Software feature is about how wonderful Knoppix Linux is and all the many ways it can be used (the article is not on their Web site, though). PC Mag columnist John Dvorak first wrote about Knoppix in August 2004—don't they even read their own columnists over there?

Anyway, I have been maintaining at least 14 different boot-from-CD Linux and UNIX iso images on the download server for our students for quite a while now (alas, not publicly available). Here is a far-from-comprehensive list of some of the most popular boot-from-CD Linux and UNIX distributions:

Aurox® Live (RedHat/Fedora) http://www.aurox.org/en/
Damn Small Linux (Debian) http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/
DragonFlyBSD (FreeBSD) http://www.dragonflybsd.org/
dyne:bolic http://www.dynebolic.org/
FreeBSD LiveCD Tool Set (FreeBSD) http://livecd.sourceforge.net/
FreeSBIE (FreeBSD) http://www.freesbie.org/
Gnoppix (Debian/Ubuntu) http://www.gnoppix.org/
GoblinX (Slackware) http://www.goblinx.com.br/en/
KANOTIX (Debian) http://kanotix.com/
Knoppix (Debian) http://knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html and http://www.knoppix.net/
Knoppix CeBIT with QEMU - Bittorrent: http://stacktrace.org/index_html/20050313-Knoppix3.8CeBitTorrent/
KNOPPIX_V3.8-2005-02-28-CeBIT_Edition.iso.torrent
Kubuntu (Debian/Ubuntu) http://www.kubuntu.org/
Linux4all Basilisk Workstation (Fedora Core 3) http://www.linux4all.de/livecd/basilisk/1.40/
Mandriva Move (Originally RedHat) http://www.mandriva.com/products/move Download: http://www1.mandrivalinux.com/en/ftp.php3#move
OnebaseGo http://www.ibiblio.org/onebase/
PCLinuxOS Preview (Mandrake) http://www.pclinuxonline.com/pclos/
SLAX (Slackware) http://slax.linux-live.org/
SimplyMEPIS Live CD http://www.mepis.org/
SUSE LINUX Professional 9.3 Live version (Originally Slackware) http://www.novell.com/products/linuxprofessional/downloads/suse_linux/
Ubuntu Live CD (Debian) http://www.ubuntulinux.org/

The Knoppix with QEMU version will even autostart and run Linux in it's own built-in virtual machine in Windows. Very cool.

You can see a much larger list of boot-from-CD operating system versions at The LiveCD List http://www.frozentech.com/content/livecd.php.

(BTW, I do know my comments don't work. I'm working on it.)