Quote Originally Posted by jbreazeale
No, I haven't tried Debian Etch. I didn't even know Debian Etch existed, so I should look up information on it.

You say, "for the same applications," while that's true I don't want to spend the time paring Debian down into the same set of applications. What's on the live-CD is good enough for me.
Etch is the "testing" version of Debian, but it is the version that Knoppix is mostly based on and is due to be the official "stable" version later this year. Start here to get a copy. Apparenty they are doing some changes to the distribution system so you can't do a net-install at the moment, but you can still install from CD #1. One big problem with installing Knoppix is that it has been an incopatable mix of three different Debian versions, so updating or installing anything else breaks lots of things. Installing a real Debian system will avoid this.

You don't spend time paring Debian down. Just the opposite, you install Debian and then build on it. You can apt-get install any of the packages on the Knoppix CD from the CD or from the Internet. Since you are not likely to use all of the applications on the Knoppix CD, installing just what you use with apt-get install should save space, maybe a lot of space. And it literally takes just seconds to install most packages (obviously some large packages like Open Office take somewhat longer, but not much).

You indeed might find some issue that would justify staying with Knoppix rather than Debian, but I can't imagine what that would be. But most people who do install Knoppix are like you, they simply have not tried to install Debian and instead just fight with Knoppix install problems.