I read about this on the Seti news page and thought others may be interested.
QuoteDotsch/UX a Linux distribution, based on Ubuntu Linux.
The purpose is to make a Linux distribution for BOINC which easily installs and boot from a USB stick, hard disk and
from diskless clients and also has some interfaces to setup the diskless server and the clients automatically.
Dotsch/UX can be installed by a few steps on a USB stick. Minimum USB Stick size 1 GB, recommended 2 GB.
The installation requires about 500 MB for the OS Image, a second image on the USB stick (about 200..500 MB) for OS changes, OS updates and your data, plus a separate image (recommended 500 to 1 GB) for the BOINC installation. The size of the BOINC image depends strongly on the BOINC projects you would crunch !
The data will be immediately written to the USB stick, so you have no data loss.
http://www.dotsch.de/boinc/Dotsch_UX.html
Yeah, read about that one. Unfortunately it's only 32bit at the moment.
But you can just install command line Ubuntu on a USB key and use that. I had an E4300 running BOINC 24/7 for a month with a 2GB stick as its only (bootable) drive. Not hard to do either.