According to Mike Pfaiffer:
I asked this question at the meeting but kind of got sidetracked. Does anybody have a favourite bootable CD distro they would recommend as a "will work on any machine immediately" demo? I tried Vietual Linux 1.1 from http://virtual-linux.org and it couldn't get past five or six processes respawning too fast.
I haven't worked with any of these, so I can't offer any recommendations. However, a friend of mine told me about a distribution from France called DemoLinux...
Since it was small, I mirrored it on the MUUG server quite some time ago...
ftp://ftp.muug.mb.ca/mirror/demolinux/demolinux/
... however, they discontinued their FTP service, so the mirror stopped working. You can still download from their web site (or get the older versions from our mirror).
I have no idea how this one might compare to other bootable CD distros.