Well, I’m not sure where I got the previous information, but Helix is based on Knoppix. What really surprised me, however, is its windows support. After burning the CD, I stuck it back into my computer running Win XP, and it launched an application that could be used to research (and hopefully fix) a problem. I did have a problem shutting down the application — it repeatedly asked me whether I wanted to write a log file, but it finally quit after I said no 5-10 times.
I also booted from the CD, but didn’t do much there. I browsed around and saw that the forensics tools were very prominent; I launched Autopsy, but quickly discovered that I needed to RTFM before I went much further.