BKO is based on a REALLY SMALL linux ... about 1 Megabyte.   It can be installed onto just 1 small partition of a USB, CD (or floppy if you have one).

Its sole purpose is to boot and provide you with a simple GUI menu system (see pictures on the site) where you can select which OS you want to boot and then BKO uses HTTPFS to download and boot that OS for you.

NOTE: on their website their list of supported OS and OS version is very outdated.   When you actually do this you will
            see Ubuntu 10.04 desktop and server, you will also see newer versions of fedora as well as other linux distributions.

I've started using this with virtual machines.

I download the CD ISO and then use that to create a KVM virtual machine instance using that .ISO file.

Why?

Well I use that 1 KVM VM instance to launch any new VM instance I might need.     Since it is only 1 Megabyte in size
it boots nearly immediately.   I select which Linux distribution I want, what version and the BKO then downloads the selected OS and boots it.

It has worked great so far.

Off of the BKO FAQ you should note:

BKO is based on HTTPFS and it uses only valid HTTP requests. It means, if you have HTTP access, you can boot with BKO.
Only problem that may occur is if you are behind HTTP proxy. We plan to add support for HTTP proxy in near future. Stay tuned till then.

It is expected that you can use Public DNS system as BKO is configured to use Public dns servers instead of the servers provided by user or DHCP. We will be soon fixing this problem. Till then, you are expected to have public DNS access.

That 2nd paragraph I think may be outdated as I believe you can now install the BKO "server" locally instead of using the BKO.org servers to download from.

If you install your own BKO server locally then you "could" install all of the OS's you work with on it.    Then you could use your own BKO to select and more importantly boot a pre-configured OS !!!      I haven't checked but I am wondering if a Windows OS could be booted using BKO as well?

I'm thinking you could have something like a preconfigured Ubuntu (or fedora etc) desktop with x2go client configurations and applications already installed and then just use the BKO and their GPXE to boot the clients.

I haven't gotten as far as looking into installing it locally so my current workaround is to use BKO to boot then I use the python based Fabric library to automagically provision the OS with x2go, the apps I want etc.

Fabric is really simple to use and lets you execute remote commands via scripts so you can for instance install x2go server or client very easily..

After the Fabric script is done my virtual machine has the OS of my choice with all the apps and x2go installed.

Another interesting technology I discovered lately and tried out is USB over IP.    Perhaps this could be incorporated into a future feature for x2go server & client ???

How To Set Up A USB-Over-IP Server And Client With Ubuntu 10.04

Version 1.0
Author: Falko Timme <ft [at] falkotimme [dot] com>

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Last edited 01/18/2010

This tutorial shows how to set up a USB-over-IP server with Ubuntu 10.04 as well as a USB-over-IP client (also running Ubuntu 10.04). The USB/IP Project aims to develop a general USB device sharing system over IP network. To share USB devices between computers with their full functionality, USB/IP encapsulates "USB I/O messages" into TCP/IP payloads and transmits them between computers. USB-over-IP can be useful for virtual machines, for example, that don't have access to the host system's hardware - USB-over-IP allows virtual machines to use remote USB devices.

1 Preliminary Note

This tutorial is based on AliRezaTaleghani's tutorial How To Modify Your Gnu/Linux Box To Serve As A USB Over IP Server, but I've adjusted it for Ubuntu 10.04 (server and client). If you want to use a Windows client, please take a look at AliRezaTaleghani's tutorial - that part is still the same.

In this tutorial I use the server server1.example.com with the IP address 192.168.0.100 and the client client1.example.com with the IP address 192.168.0.101, both running Ubuntu 10.04. These settings might differ for you, so you have to replace them where appropriate.

2 Installing And Using USB/IP On The Server

root@server1:~# lsmod | grep usbip
usbip 15124 0
usbip_common_mod 13605 1 usbip
root@server1:~#

To make sure that both modules get loaded automatically whenever you boot the system, you can add them to /etc/modules:

root@server1:~# usbipd -D
Bind usbip.ko to a usb device to be exportable!
root@server1:~#

Now attach a USB device that you want to export to the server - I'm using a SanDisk USB flash drive here.

root@server1:~# lsusb
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 0781:5151 SanDisk Corp. Cruzer Micro Flash Drive
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
root@server1:~#

root@server1:~# usbip_bind_driver --list
List USB devices
- busid 1-1 (0781:5151)
1-1:1.0 -> usb-storage

root@server1:~#

As you see, the Vendor/Device ID of my SanDisk USB flash drive (0781:5151) corresponds to the BUSID 1-1. We need this BUSID to attach the USB device to the server:

root@server1:~# usbip_bind_driver --usbip 1-1
** (process:765): DEBUG: 1-1:1.0 -> usb-storage
** (process:765): DEBUG: unbinding interface
** (process:765): DEBUG: write "add 1-1" to /sys/bus/usb/drivers/usbip/match_busid
** Message: bind 1-1 to usbip, complete!
root@server1:~#

... you should see that the usbip daemon is listening on port 3240 so please make sure that this port isn't blocked by your firewall:

root@server1:~# netstat -tap
Active Internet connections (servers and established)
Proto Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address           Foreign Address         State       PID/Program name
tcp        0      0 *:ssh                   *:*                     LISTEN      537/sshd
tcp        0      0 *:3240                  *:*                     LISTEN      762/usbipd
tcp        0     52 server1.example.com:ssh 192.168.0.199:4024      ESTABLISHED 667/0
tcp6       0      0 [::]:ssh                [::]:*                  LISTEN      537/sshd
root@server1:~#