Installing SMGL via USB Drive
With many users either not having a disc drive, small netbooks for example, and others not wanting to bother with one, the best option is usually a usb drive for an install. Below is a simple 'how to' on creating a usb drive boot the SMGL iso.
Most people recommend Unetbootin for this, but it won't work out of the box for SourceMage. The reason for this is that Unetbootin only supports FAT filesystems, and the kernel found on the SourceMage iso only has FAT available as a module. Unetbootin also has a tendency to be deadly slow (~90 minutes last time I tried with the 650MB amd64 image).
For these reasons, we'll cover a method using extlinux. I will not go into the details, as you're supposed to have some basic knowledge of GNU utilities. There is a thread on UbuntuForums that also explains it.
Format your drive
First we need to find our drive. The easiest way is to watch the output of dmesg while plugging your stick, or check /proc/partitions.
Then, assuming the drive is /dev/sdb, we'll create a clean partition table and a filesystem. Be careful, as we sometimes refer to the drive and sometimes to the partition.
fdisk -cu /dev/sdb
then, in sequence, type some thing like
o*n*p*1***t*83*a*1*w*
replacing each * with a powerful stroke on your [enter] key. In particular, the partition you create must be marked as bootable. RTFM for more details.
mkfs.ext3 -L SMGL_ISO /dev/sdb1
Mount your drives and copy the files
mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/tmp mount -o loop smgl-*.iso /mnt/iso cd !$ cp -rp * /mnt/tmp
Make your stick bootable
Find the mbr.bin given with the extlinux package, it can be located in /usr/lib/extlinux/mbr.bin (Debian-derivates) or in other places.
cat `locate extlinux/mbr.bin` > /dev/sdb cd /mnt/tmp mv isolinux/isolinux.cfg extlinux.conf rm -r isolinux extlinux -i .
Umount everything
cd
umount /mnt/{iso,tmp}
Install!
Plug your USB stick in whichever computer you want SourceMage installed on, turn it on, find a way to make it boot on USB, and hit [enter] at the boot: prompt.
If it does not work, you might want to try this:
/boot/linux root=/dev/sda1 rootdelay=10
changing sda1 with whatever value suits your system best. Specifying rootdelay should not be necessary, but it can't hurt (and 5 seconds should be enough)
Follow instructions on screen or on the NewInstall page, and that's it.