Is the idea with these live distros to use a CD-RW such that you can config it a bit, and keep files on it and so forth ?

Do they work with CD-RWs ? Are CD-RWs even bootable ?

well, they should work with a cd-rw but no thats not the idea, the idea is that its already up and working how a normal user would like and easy to change, what sounds really nice to me is mandrakemove which i have not tried but if your looking for something that will let you move from computer to computer and keep files and settings it sounds really slick its a bootable live cd that you use with a usb thumbstick so it boots, finds your /home on the thumbstick and loads all your confs and files for you hope it works as good as it sounds, i might have to go out and try it, theres a review in the distro review section go check it out

one idea I'v always had is for a live CD to reformat a usb thumb drive into ext2 then copy all of its config files to it and mount it to "/etc" then from that point on every time you booted from that CD youl'd tell it to mount the key drive for its configuration

of course this would take kernel level usb storage drivers and some crafty boot configuration, but i still think its a good idea.

plus it doesnt have the other downfalls of other entirely thumbdrive based distros (for the most part just really slow read/ write)