Kanotix was even better. Kano built on top of knoppix.

Lateron I think this was renamed to sidux, based on debian sid.

Been quite a while since I last used either though. Nowadays most linux distribution .iso files work - they may not be as adjusted as knoppix or kanotix but my use cases have changed. I mostly use manjaro these days, it works quite well as base system (I modify it anyway, so what I am using has only little parts of manjaro left, mostly just the linux kernel and glibc, rest I already compiled anew from source).