After spending a couple of painful days trying to install Linux on a notebook with no floppy or CD, I have finally got there. I failed with the standard knoppix because a client booted from knoppix-terminalserver has root disabled for security. I switched to clusterknoppix which has a number of additions to suppor clustering. There is also an option to enable root on the client computers.

It would be exceptionaly usefull to have that option in knoppix with the default off of course.