i don't really know much about this system but if someone could tell me what apps it comes pre-installed with and can you install off the live cd or no

From memory, it comes with what you'd expect to try out for an office environment, including Star Office.

Networking seems magnificently simple... it detects...

The live distro does not seem to allow writing to any disks on the machine it is running on, nor on network shares.

No, installer is completely disabled, and I guess the reason for no writing is to prevent you from copying the file structure to try to get it working as an installed version.

As a demo rather than a live distro, I found it very good because it feels solid, dependable, and a good product... but I wonder how well the YaST installer presumably packaged with the bought version will handle updates to software in the distribution, and additions to the installed base of software.

Seems nice, though. I like it better than Knoppix which I think the live version may well lean upon fairly heavily.

JDS's current Release 2 comes stock with the following apps:

Mozilla
Evolution
StarOffice
GIMP
Real Player
File Roller
gaim
Acrobat Reader

among others less universally critical.

You can't install new apps with the liveCD but could get the 90-day trial edition recently posted by Sun here:
http://sdlcweb1d.sun.com/ECom/EComAc...MLoadBalanced=

...and then go wild installing fresh applications from a long list of RPM's available at JDShelp.org, here:
http://jdshelp.org/srpms.php

The over 100 apps available there include:

Firefox
Thunderbird
Samba
Apache
Scribus
MySQL
postgreSQL
NovellClient
CD & DVD tools
and many others.

I hope this is useful.
-Sam Hiser