Below are distribution notes from past experiences. If you have additional notes that you would like to add for other distributions, please forward them to me.
7.2. Knoppix
I recently started using Knoppix. Pasi Oja-Nisula reports:
For me the best thing about using Knoppix is that I don't need a specific boot medium for each machine, but I can use the same tools all the time. And hardware support in Knoppix is really great. I don't have that much experience with different platforms, but all the machines I've tried have worked fine, scsi drivers are found and so on.
I'm doing this recovery thing by copying the backups over the network to other machine. The restore involves booting the Knoppix cd, fetching the metadata.tar.gz from the network machine. Then make.dev, mount.dev, fetching the other tar.gz files, grub and reboot. Some typing involved but thanks to your scripts it's quite straighforward. Unless changing from ide to scsi or something, but even then it's not that difficult, since Linux is easy to restore to different hardware.
Let me add to that that Knoppix detects USB devices for you, which is really nice. They make excellent (and roomier) substitutes for the ZIP drive.
Also see "System recovery with Knoppix".
Do your restore as user "root" rather than as user "knoppix". Otherwise you may get some directories and files owned by an oddball user or group. Also, for Knoppix, we tar the first stage stuff saving numeric user & group values instead of by name. The names may point to different numbers on knoppix, so we would be restoring the files incorrectly.
7.3. finnix
Finnix has some of the same advantages of Knoppix. In addition, it runs in command line mode with mouse support, which is great for the task at hand. It's small, under 100 MB as of this writing, so you can remaster it with your first stage data on it. It boots quickly. And it has LVM support. And Zile, a subset of Emacs. I am pleased with finnix for this use.
Take our 
