I liked Kanotix, but switched to Sidux after the Kanotix team left to stay "purist" and stick to Debian rather than Ubuntu. Ubuntu is decent but I'd rather stay as close to Debian as possible.
Sidux a great way to have a Sid liveCD that is almost effortless to install to hard disk.
http://sidux.com/index.html
I then used
http://www.debian-multimedia.org/ to update my sources list with the useful stuff a purist distro will not or cannot include.