Hello Everyone,
I was looking for a Debian based live CD for diagonistic purposes and came across a very nice featherweight distro called Finnix. Here is what the site says.....
"Finnix is a self-contained, bootable Linux CD distribution ("LiveCD") for system administrators, based on Debian testing. You can mount and manipulate hard drives and partitions, monitor networks, rebuild boot records, install other operating systems, and much more. Finnix includes the latest technology for system administrators, with Linux kernel 2.6, LVM2, encrypted partitions, etc. And above all, Finnix is small; currently the entire distribution is over 300MiB, but is dynamically compressed into a bootable image of about 100MiB^1 http://www.finnix.org/#endnote_isosizes . Finnix is not intended for the average desktop user, and does not include any desktops, productivity tools, or sound support, in order to keep distribution size low."
I downloaded it yesterday night and tried it today on my system. Booting is fast and takes you to a root prompt. It has a lot of applications for administering disks, testing the internet, even has pppoe tools. I was able to make a pppoe connection and surf the net using lynx. The best part is that though it is featherweight, it uses the latest kernel so it can mount ntfs partitions with write enabled for taking backups into them. When you mount the partition, simply replace the normal -t ntfs with -t ntfs-3g.
If you are into maintaining GNU/Linux or Doze systems, this CD is a must have.