Knoppix is a Debian-based Linux "distribution" that can be booted off of a CD. Out of curiousity, I downloaded and burned an iso image. It booted without any problem on my Dell Inspiron laptop. I stayed in text mode, since the laptop is shy on RAM.
There's a surprising amount of stuff there, including Perl 5.6.1 and Apache.
mkdir /ramdisk/c
mount -t vfat -o ro /dev/hda1 /ramdisk/c
gives a read-only (i.e., paranoid) view of the laptop's win98 disk. It felt kinda strange wandering around my win98 directory hierarchy from Linux. Later I'll look into how it handles networking. That might be useful in a rescue situation.
