Security question

I like my dial up box running a knoppix cdrom, with persistent home and 
"myconfig" located on a 128mb sandisk memory card. No hard drive is present.
It dials into the internet and masquerades the connection to other PC's on my
LAN. I am dialing in as user with kppp i.e I am not running as root, while
on the net.

Do you think this is more or less secure than my old hard drive (knoppix) installation 
with the shorewall firewall running ? 


Brian