and

grml is a live cd, which is far and away my favorite way to get distro's as the simplicity is hard to beat.  In turn installing is done from the desktop (or in this case, command line).  To start it off, you put in the command "grml2hd" which starts up a text based installer which works quite well (screenshots here).  Once the copy over is complete, you are prompted for a root password and username and that's it.  It is reasonably quick and effective.

First Boot:
On boot, either from the cd or from the hard drive, the Knoppix boot procedure is run to identify all hardware, what seems a bit odd about this is that it does not save and than skip this process once installed, but this is also fairly early in the distro build process.  As the distro is designed as a text/command line based distro, it does not go into X automatically, nor could I find an easy manner to convince it to do so.  So, you log in and than command Startx, at which point it yells at you!  "You can't do that" it says, you must use "grml-x to start up the x server."  Ok,  I type in grml-x, and guess what, it yells at me again, "You can't do that" I find the error message rather amusing actually,  it then goes on to explain that you need to tell it what window manager to start, so you actually need to type in "grml-x fluxbox" to start fluxbox.  Now I get into X, and it works quite fine.  Now I am making a big deal out of nothing really here, truly if I had bothered to actually read some of the info on the grml.org page, I would have already known about this and been able to not invoke the wrath of zsh!
: )

What it has:
A LOT!
There are over 2200 packages stuffed into this distro and it is debian based, so presumably the entire debian apt-get world as well.  A great deal of it is clearly based around text usage, for example, the games list are all text based games, some dating back quite a few years.  Honestly, you should get the distro just for these!  I haven't had this kind of fun in years!  Firefox is included, elmo or mailx for e-mail, mosaic for your tunes, xpdf, kernel 2.6.11.8 and a great deal more. Screen shots here and here.

What it has not:
There is a lot missing too, like KDE and Gnome.  I also did not find a word processor installed.  However, there is still the wonderfully world of apt-get which should be able to get any of these things for you.  The one thing I could not apt-get was sound, it just didn't work.

Usage:
Again, this one is different, but overall I found the feel to be very quick and had no stability problems at all.  Once installed, I found the boot process to be long due to the re-discovery of all the hardware again but this is an early release and I hope this is on the list to be corrected.  There is nearly every possible text based substitution available and honestly it can take a bit of getting used to unless that is already your thing. 

Conclusions:
Overall, grml is solid, likable and gives a very fresh look at an old way of doing things.  While I will say that text based apps are generally not my thing, if it is yours, you gotta give this one a look because it is all here and it all works, if your like me and enjoy your GUI, you really should have a look any way.  There is just too much here that deserves your attention, it may make you appreciate your GUI more, or you might find that you like the command line, if nothing else, get it for the games!