I want to know what Linux based OS are available in 'Run from CD' form. I have heard about Knoppix and seems pretty good. I have also seen this Suse CD but it did not have any development support.. no gcc or g++.

What are other similar OS out there and which do you think is best?

There's a fairly complete list here:
http://www.distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=cd

I vote for knoppix

Thanx man it really was quite a comprehensive list. Now i want rating from you people which one do you think is best and why!

I like Knoppix quite a bit...I've used it on 3 different machines and it ran great on all of them. I even liked it so much I used it to do a hard drive install of it, and now I'm running it as my main OS on my Linux machine .

I havent used Knoppix yet so tell me how long does it take to load. Does it require any space on the harddrive like Suse Boot CD.

Knoppix usually loads pretty quickly for me, but I'd say if you have <128M of RAM it might not be as fast. It requires no space on the hard drive if you just want to run off cd, and actually will tend to do as much as possible to ensure the hard drive remains untouched (i.e., you might have to issue some special commands to enable write access to the mounted hard drive).

Yup, I was using Knoppix for a while to get ahold of linux.

Then i reformatted my windows partition and went for a HD install

No looking back.

It's great the number of apps and windowmanagers that come pre-installed, which was great for a newbie like me.

And of course, I can always get rid of the extra bulk.

Try it, you'll like it!

No HD space required, although if you have a swap partition already, you can let it use it to speed it up a bit.
Boot time is less than a minute on my machine from cd (300mhz celeron, 194 megs ram)
And autodetected everything but my IP settings, which i don't really think is possible without dhcp enabled

_shade

couldnt resist, im downloading knoppix now just to try it out.

well good for you man.. but unfortunately with my connection speed it will take ages therefore i am planning to buy the CD. I hope it lives up to what i heard about it

it will be another 3 hours before i have the whole CD. i guess if i were on 56K that would be about 12 hours or so.....i think i let a download go for that long before.

hey dont forget to post your review here after u have used it. i would like to hear what you think about it.