GRML

“grml is a Debian-based system administration distro, providing more than 1700 software packages. “You’ll get sysadmins favourite tools, security- and network-related software, data recovery- and forensic-tools, LaTeX, many editors, shells, and of course many texttools.”

Origin – Home Page: Austria – grml

Desktop: grml does not ship with a desktop, but comes with grml-x, which is a wrapper that allows for easy setup of the X window system for awesome, dwm, evilwm, fluxbox, fvwm, fvwm2, fvwm-crystal, openbox, pekwm, ratpoison, twm, wqwm, windowlab, wmii, and wm-ng.

Price: Free and Open Source

Comments: This is an all-around system and network admin/security distro, that has support for x86 and amd64 architecture. It is a live CD distro, and like almost all Linux distros, makes it easy to install to a hard disk if so desired.

In addition to the usual assortment of software that you expect to find in a distro of this sort, grml also ships with some custom tools. One example is grml-vpn, which enables a user to establish encrypted communication channels in a network.

Download/Buy: The latest stable versions are grml-1.1 and grml64-0.2 for the x86 and amd64 architectures respectively. Both are available for download here. You may order a grml CD from the vendors provided in this list.

Tutorials/Tips: The grml wiki is a good place to look for usage info.