The distribution derived from "Kano's Scriptpage for Knoppix". He wrote about Knoppix: "I like it much, but I had to improve it :)". One of the main differences from Knoppix was the support of hard disk installation. The first "Kanotix"-preview was released at 24 December 2003 "KANOTIX XMAS 2003 PREVIEW". In 2004 and 2005 KANOTIX was a popular distribution ranking in the top 20 of distrowatch.com. In 2004 the releases were named "Bug Hunter" (Bug Hunter-01-2004 - X-2004). After problems with the stability in 2006 Jörg "Kano" Schirottke decided to move from Debian Sid to a less volatile basis. The co-developer and other of the Kanotix-Team wanted to stay with Debian-Sid and left the project, to start sidux, a new distribution based on Debian sid. The last Kanotix release based on Debian Sid was 2006-01-RC4. The first Release based on Debian-stable was the Kanotix-Thorhammer in 2007. After the Debian-Etch-Release in April 2007 Kanotix was no longer compatible with Debian Sid. So a Howto was given, "Steps to update right", to move a KANOTIX-installation to the new base by dist-upgrade. After 3 months of development and several beta Releases the new "Kanotix-2007-Thorhammer-RC6" was publicly available for download. The last published version was "Kanotix-2007-Thorhammer-RC7". The "development in 2008" featured continuously kernel-updates and a lot of backports in the Thorhammer-repository. Some of the additional packages were adaptations for netbooks and notebooks. A highlighted additional backport was OpenOffice.org 3.2.x  The (old) stable Release 2010 "Kanotix-Excalibur" was based on Debian 5 ("Lenny") and had compared to Thorhammer some basic changes (based on Debian-Live, bootloader Grub2). Furthermore, Kanotix-Excalibur was available for 32-Bit and 64-Bit architecture and a 2in1 iso with both. Additionally there are Kanotix Excalibur 2010 KDE4 (KDE SC 4.3.2) versions available and a "all-in-one"-DVD.iso. Kanotix-Excalibur contains the more up-to-date Ubuntu-kernels 2.6.32-BFS with special patches.