few ideas

[David Douthitt]

first knoppix seems to have a apache among other things, I can't understand why.

If apache is present, I can't find it. I see thttpd, which is much smaller and less of a drain, and still provides quality service.

and there should be a password for the root user even if it's just knoppix, or perhaps the fine gentleman's first name who created knoppix, sorry can't remember his name offhand. that would be something you can remember, but something most users (if it were to be hacked) would not.... and we would not get the errors that are caused by not having them in place. (Ps. I know sudo passwd works but I don't want to keep using it everytime)

Please, I LIKE the knoppix way of doing it. No way to get hacked on a unmodified system. It's relatively trivial to copy in a version of /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow on boot using a knoppix.sh script at boot time - a version of passwd and shadow that has the passwords you want already set.