Thanks to Sugar Labs you can now have your Ubuntu 8.10 or Fedora 10 linux distributions with sugar on it…..Shweet :-).  Yep you heard right, go here and grab your OLPC XO inspired 1GB USB stick image and boot all those old PC’s into sugar. According to Walter Bender (the creator of Sugar OS) a new version dubbed Sucrose 0.84 is on its way soon. Complete article (including interview with Mr. Bender) is over at XConomy.

University of Massachusetts Dartmouth: ATMC Physics Professor Gaurav Khanna and Principal Investigator Chris Poulin have created a great step-by-step guide that shows you how $4000 and a bit of elbow grease can get you a nice supercomputer cluster. They use Fedora Core 8 distribution, due to the prevalence of Fedora and its Cell SDK (3.0) compatibility

I’d covered Fedora’s Live USB creator a while back. But for those of you wanting to install other flavours of linux on a USB stick (or a HD even), the process was lengthy and cumbersome. That was before UNetbootin, the Universal Netboot Installer. You see UNetbootin can be run from Linux or Windows and will enable you to install a fully functional linux distro to a USB stick or even a spare partition.

The current version has built-in support for the following distributions:

• Ubuntu (and official derivatives)
  • 6.06 LTS
  • 6.10
  • 7.04
  • 7.10
  • 8.04 LTS
• Debian
  • Stable/Etch
  • Testing/Lenny
  • Unstable/Sid
• Linux Mint
  • 3.1
  • 4.0
  • 5-r1
• openSUSE
  • 10.2
  • 10.3
  • 11.0
  • Factory
• Arch Linux
  • 2007.08
• Damn Small Linux
  • 4.4
• SliTaz
  • Stable
  • Cooking
• Puppy Linux
  • 4.00
• FreeBSD
  • 6.3
  • 7.0
• NetBSD
  • 4.0
• Fedora
  • 7
  • 8
  • 9
  • Rawhide
• PCLinuxOS
  • 2007
  • 2008
• Gentoo
  • 2007.0
  • 2008.0
• Zenwalk
  • 5.2
• Slax
  • 6
• Dreamlinux
  • 3.2
• Elive
  • Development
• CentOS
  • 4
  • 5
• Mandriva
  • 2007.1
  • 2008.0
  • 2008.1
• FaunOS
  • 0.5.4
• Frugalware Linux
  • Stable
  • Testing
  • Current

So go ahead and try some of those acquired flavors of Linux, or that FreeBSD you always wanted to install, but were too scared to. After all it’s only a USB stick, if it screws up just format and reinstall in 5-10 minutes using UNetbootin again.

UNetbootin can also be used to load various system utilities, including:

• Parted Magic, a partition manager that can resize, repair, backup, and restore partitions.
• Super Grub Disk, a boot utility that can restore and repair overwritten and misconfigured GRUB installs or directly boot various operating systems
• Backtrack, a utility used for network analysis and penetration testing.
• Ophcrack, a utility which can recover Windows passwords.
• NTPasswd, a utility which can reset Windows passwords and edit the registry.
• Gujin, a graphical bootloader that can also be used to boot various operating systems and media.
• Smart Boot Manager (SBM), which can boot off CD-ROM and floppy drives on computers with a faulty BIOS.
• FreeDOS, which can run BIOS flash and other legacy DOS utilities.

So have fun and happy installing…..

I wanted to install the AccessGrid 3.1 collaborative software under FC9.0 earlier on and discovered that the machine didn’t have a CD or DVD. It did however have a newer mobo that allows for USB booting, so I searched around and found Fedora liveusb-creator. What a beauty, the fedora guys make it really simple to get Fedora live CD stuffed onto a USB stick. All you need is the software, a 1GB+ stick and a windows machine. Here is the process:

1. Select either to Use existing Live CD or Download Fedora.
2. Set the Target Device to point to your USB flash drive.
3. Move the Persistent Overlay slider to set the capacity to use for the persistent image. I was able to manually push the slider by clicking on it and using the cursor keys to change the size by single MB’s rather than the jumping default style. This lets you to allocate extra space on your USB stick, allowing you to save files and make modifications to your live operating system that will persist after you reboot. This essentially lets you carry your own personalized Fedora with you at all times, but only works with Fedora 9 right now.
4. Click Create Live USB to begin the creation process.

Sit back and watch the progress bar, there is also helpful messages in the little window. Once everything is done “safely” remove your USB Stick and use it to boot into Fedora Core 9. Don’t forget that you might have to change your boot device in BIOS to the USB key (or sometimes just pressing ESC during BIOS boot gets you to a boot menu).

MythDora 4.0–Fedora Core 6.0 plus MythTV costumizations–is out. It is designed to format your hard drive and install everything needed for a fully functional MythTV System. MythPVR.com has created a three-part screencast of the installation process covering MythDora installation, configuration, and MythTV setup.