dev.

Netbooks are popping up everywhere. They are small and powerfull enough to be used with Windows, but on most of them Linux runs just as well. But since they don’t bring DVD or CD-ROMs along in most cases, Linux has to be installed with the help of an bootable USB stick.

Fortunately there is UNetbootin. This handy little tools allows to install a standard Linux/BSD image on your flash drive. No need to fiddle around with command line parameters, just download the desired distribution, run UNetbootin, letting the tool prepare your USB drive, and reboot. That’s all

UNetbootin supports a variety of distributions: Ubuntu, openSuse, Fedora, Debian, FreeBSD, NetBSD, Slax, CentOS, Gentoo, … and much more!

Note: Fedora is bringing another tool to the party. Check for the details of their liveusb-creator here.

The Nexenta Project is taking an interesting approach to assemble an operating system: they take the kernel from OpenSolaris and the userland from Ubuntu.

So they get:

• the stability, security and advanced system management and development tools from OpenSolaris (DTrace, ZFS, …),
• the package repository from Debian,
• and the easy-to-use desktop from Ubuntu.

If you are looking at an interesting weekend project, trying it in VMWare might be just what you are looking for!