First of all, Markus, (giggle) not taking any chances huh? ( asbestos suit, lol )

Ok, RoyalMail,

Knoppix is based ( loosely ) on the unstable, Sid, Debian release - it is more likely, a hodge-podge, or combination of Sid, Sarge, and Woody, releases of Debian... Kind of like taking the best of all of them, and putting them together in a distrobution. Which isnt that all bad, it may not be a "pure" distrobution, like Woody, but it has its advantages.

Debian uses three "phases" of distrobution, as mentioned by Markus, and your research. When something is being developed, it goes in as "unstable", kind of like Beta in programming language, then it gets tested, checked for "security holes", problems with other parts of the "system", etc... Which then moves it into "testing", once it has been "pounded" and the life tested the heck out of, it makes it into the "stable" phase. Some programs never get past "unstable", either due to staffing, interest, time, you name it, so if you want that "neat-o" game, that someone turned in, and is at "unstable" phase, you may never see it go to either "testing" or "stable", it may though.

The problem with Knoppix, and this can be backed by a lot of people, is, that it is made up of "many" phases of the Debian processing structure; stable, testing, and unstable. This can get Knoppix into trouble. When you start upgrading "parts", they can get mixed up, thus the reason why a lot of people suggest you not run a "unstable" version on a "production" system, like a server. I, for one, have been running Knoppix fine, both the v3.3, and now, v3.4, with the experimental 2.6.6 kernel, without a single "real" problem. "Real" defined here as, the OS has been fine, just me doing something stupid, causing any problems. ( I'll explain that next )

Only time I have had problems with Knoppix, having it hard drive installed, and, being my "production" machine, is, when I do something stupid, like doing a "blanket" upgrade, or a dist-upgrade. I even accomplished messing up my system using something that should have prevented me from doing these things, but, it let me do something stupid. If you want to run Knoppix, great, just think of the consequences of doing something stupid...

You should never run a apt-get upgrade, or a apt-get dist-upgrade - rather, run a "packager" program, like Synaptic, and never, I repeat, never, run a upgrade all - i've done it, all three of these things, and it isnt pretty. Other than doing the "stupid" things mentioned above, I have not had any problems running Knoppix. In fact, Knoppix has been far more stable, even being called "unstable", than any other OS I have ever run. The only time Knoppix has had problems, is because I did something, and instead of Knoppix saying something like: "I wont do this", it did it cause I told it to. Even "synaptic", let me do it, even though it did warn me ahead of time that this wasnt a good idea, I still checked the box saying "do it anyway". So, knoppix is not at fault, nor is synaptic, for me doing what I should have known was a major boo-boo...