A. Since having a default password is very unsecure if the box is connected to a network and services started (such as ssh, http, ftp, ...) the Live CD does not allow root login by default. The only login allowed is the password-less "live" account.

In order to perform tasks as root use sudo: or run as shell as root via sudo: it is also possible to enable to root account by setting the password with sudo: We strongly recomment to set a live password when you start remote services such as ssh, http, ... or enable the root account:

A. Well, we did not start yet another one. We just implemented one with the long existing build-system we use for dozen of other tasks, such as server, desktop, embedded systems and high performance clustering for years.
There is no reason for us to use another distribution or live-cd when we have thousands of packages that are well maintained, up-to-date and built from source for any architecture available. The Live CD is just another output format of the fully automated build system.

Also with Knoppix many forks are needed to create GNOME, XFCE or other specialized systems - with T2 you can just define your set of changes, such as an altered package selection and start the build system and you are done with your customized live-cd. Remastering Knoppix is just not as easy.

Another point is, that we can rebuild T2 with any new kernel, compiler, C library, X.org, KDE, OpenOffice or whatever important release and do not have to wait until e.g. Debian picks it up. And then, most important for us anyway, compiling for and architecture.