Hello.

Inspired by a discussion on this forum , I created a small and handy Linux tailored for DC nodes. It will allow you to boot your DC node directly from a 512MB USB stick, so you don't need any harddrives, etherboot configurations, NFS servers etc. And it is also much faster than installing new operating system on your DC machine.

I have been using it myself for the last week or so, and it works pretty well. I even use it to boot my x86_64 machine that has 32bit WinXP installed to crunch faster at night.

To make things more clear and create a base for future improvement, I made this simple website dedicated to this project: http://obfusc.at/ed/dclinux.html

I will try to keep it up to date with new versions.
I'm willing to spend some time improving this, so if you have any feedback, comments, propositions or wishes - please do let me know.

Here is a copy&paste of the advantages of using this special linux version, taken from my website:
- Easy to install. There is no hustle with configuration files, network set-up, or any hardware changes to your DC box.
- Requires only 512MB of disk space, so you can reuse your old USB stick or buy a cheap new one (2GB costs less than $10 these days).
- Has BOINC client installed on it and configured to run out-of-the-box.
- Provides SSH daemon (by default turned off)
- Completely secure. By default, there are no daemons running, except BOINC.
- During system startup /var directory is copied to ramdisk, and then synchronized between ramdisk and filesystem every 6 hours and on system shutdown. This saves USB write cycles which is important as most USB flash drives have limited write operations.
- Has x86_64 kernel. It comes handy for those systems where main OS is 32 bit, but you want to use the machine for crunching at night and take advantage of 64-bit CPU.
- It can spin down your hard drives to lower power consumption, heat and noise.
- It is Debian-based so you can apt-get anything you want and fine-tune the system according to your needs.

Cheers.