Quote Originally Posted by m_yates
By the way, I don't know why people say knoppix was never meant to be a Debian installer. The Debian project should adopt it for their installer. It is so much better. I've tried installing woody and I've tried the "new" sarge installer, both are pains in the rump. With knx-hdinstall, I started the script and had a working Debian system in less than 1 hour, with only a few minor glitches to iron out.
Well the simple reason why Debian isn't going to use knoppix as it's installer is that Debian currently supports 11 different hardware platforms while Knoppix supports 1 (or is it two with the ppc versions knocking around). Some of those platforms cover things like handheld computers which could never dream of coping with 700Mb of a compressed system! On top of that Debian is not a desktop distribution, but "The Universal Operating System" and hence is used for servers and network devices aswell where minimal installs are required (and tailored installs at that). The good news is that Debian has never shown the slightest animosity to other efforts to create installers for specific needs (Progeny and Corel both created their own installers) so they could well recommend Knoppix as a desktop installation method for i386 without prejudicing their own installer. Debian has always put itself forward as the basis for other distros, Knoppix is just the latest (and greatest?) in that line.