Here is an article on four different distributions that can boot a whole system without requiring any installation. Great way to allow people to see what all the fuss is about:
http://www.extremetech.com/print_article/0,3998,a=117223,00.asp
For my home machine, I’ve found an easy solution to the noise problem. I have three aging hard drives and the covers don’t fit anymore on the warped chassis so it can get really noisy, even with headphones on. Since the system is usually used for playing DVDs, it makes sense to disconnect the hard drives when I don’t need them, both for noise reduction and to increase their life.
Movix allows me to boot from the CD and simply start playing DVDs/VCDs in peace. Plus, it uses MPlayer, my favorite video player. Even my brother, an avid XP user, liked it enough to replace the Windows player he was using.
There are three variations of the project. “Movix” is the bare-bones console version that writes directly to the framebuffer while “Movix2” starts up an X session and MPlayer in gui mode. “eMovix” is used to create bootable VCDs/DVDs that play themselves. An awesome project.