gNewSense (Ubuntu without the Ubuntu).

Am I the only person on the planet running elive? Its an awesome live distro!

It'd be helpful if people could say a little bit about how a distro is good, what features do they find good.

VectorLinux has two LiveCD series: the Standard Live (a live version of the Standard distribution) and Beryl Live, for those who want eye candy in their LiveCDs....

Not quite...
BeatrIX is in a state of hiatus, due to personal reasons of the guy behind it. BeaFanatIX release 1 was a remaster and bugfix of BeatrIX, where as BeaFanatIX 2006.2 a.k.a BFX2 is distribution in it's own right.

How do you do that?

Sounds like the old Maine joke about "the sassage" (sausage):

• Looks good,
• smells good,
• but when ya clean it, ther ain't much left.

Well, someone suggested that we actually tell why we like our live distro..
I really like elive because of the speed at which the cd runs, and the blazing speed once its installed. True, it can't compete with the likes of DSL or puppy, but most can't. It looks amazing as far as the live cds go, and I personally just prefer the way that the Enlightenment DR17 window manager works. It also comes with a good selection of software out of the box, including Firefox/Thunderbird, Gaim, XChat, Gimp, Blender, Kino, Cinererlla, AcidRip, AbiWord, Gnumeric, and even some emulaters such as VMware, QEMU, ZSNES and DosBox. It even is so bold as to have an option on the menu to load the live cd in QEMU. pretty cool, to be running a live cd fast enough to boot up a QEMU image too...
Also, most things just work out of the box, like WMA, MP3, DVD etc...
its just an all around nice live cd....
PS its debian, so you get the easy apt-get stuff, and its got pretty darn good hardware detection....honestly there's not much I can criticize about this one...

puppy, hands down, is the live distro i use. although i also seem to like simplymepis(live), ubuntu(live) and gentoo(live) those distros are mainly used as installed distros where as puppy is almost entirely live.

I like your choices. Strictly as a Live CD (only), Puppy is definitely hard to beat. When using a Live CD as the basis for installing a desktop system, then I really like SimplyMEPIS.

When I use a Live CD to check out hardware or perform maintenance, then I really like Knoppix, the Swiss Army Knife of Live CDs!

The ones you mentioned are also good, and there are scads of other ones that are really good as well... of course, the software on which they are based is also good, and really starting to mature nicely!

Without a doubt, IMHO the easiest install-great graphics-one of the best forums in the Linux world (LQ.org is up there). I find that this distro is perfect to show just what Linux is about, what it can do and where it can go. Hands down better than Vista in all ways, not to mention the price. Least I add that I have given $$ support. And I am CHEAP.

DamnSmall, because it's.. well.. small ^^

I really like Wolvix Cub,
quite a good little setup
from the Norwegians.

Its Slax!

on my Apple PowerBook G4 667 I got Yellow Dog Linux v5.0.

l

It was hard but Knoppix got my vote, even that there are few other good live distribution it's still the best.

Knoppix UBER ALLES!!!!!
Though I would have to say that Puppy is my favorite for lightweight old hardware . .
Knoppix consistently has the latest greatest version of the real important free software more than any other distribution of Linux I ever knew:

http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=knoppix

Knopppix is the best Microsoft withdrawal cure.

Puppy is awesome if you ever become shit out of luck and you want to get your basic computing activities going on again with an old charity computer. Puppy is also good if you or if you need a sidekick old junker machine while the main big beast is busy. . . . . , but Puppy doesn't have nearly the diverse multimedia playing options that the Knoppix DVD has.