Good resources. We've done a bit of experimentation with USB boot ourselves. Perhaps this is one of those things we should add to the community documentation. Needs some more testing first. Also, with a bit of software (e.g., a script) much of the process could probably be automated.

Currently most of our appliances are server oriented though, and as a big fan of virtualization I figure for most of our users installing into a VM is probably the easiest way to get up running with an appliance (rather than booting hardware directly).

I guess it all depends on your usage scenario. When we get to UMPC style applications I imagine the CF drive option could be very interesting. I'll have to play around with that...

As liraz mentioned, we don't yet officially support running our software appliances from USB just yet, but it is on our todo list. You might want to check out the links Liraz provided in his post, as well as a Python script I wrote that installs an extracted ISO filesystem to a USB device.

We would love to get successfull (and unsuccessful) feedback from you guys, so let us know how it goes.