I got a green light on adding another frontend to my ridiculous, out of control myth setup, and I was intrigued by the idea of using the new Fedora 9 persistent usb setup. Ideally I would like to PXE boot the frontend, but there are some limitations w/ minimyth that look like a beating so I figured $30 for a thumbdrive would be a good compromise. Here is what I purchased:

Frys mobo combo $99 ECS crappy 6100 mini atx w/ 2.8 X2 AMD (I actually am using the 2.8 in my primary frontend so this box is using my old AMD 3200+)
Antec Minuet Case $80 Great 80+ 375 watt power supply, but the case is noisy and ugly.
2gigs of RAM $25
Patriot 8Gig thumb drive $30
Nvidia 7200 $30 half hight
DVD drive from my old Humax Tivo
Streamzap remote w/ an old serial receiver.

**I know this is probably too much detail, but I included it encase anyone else is in the market.**

I was super impressed by the speed of running from the USB drive, but there are some issues w/ the new version of xorg and Nvidia doesn't really support it yet. Also, lirc works a little different in this release. Bottom line I scrapped the install because I could tell this was going to take a lot of time to tweak and I wasn't convinced it would ever work properly. Anyway, option 2 was to install MD5 directly to the flash drive. The install took forever (30-60min), but the performance is great! I think this is actually a pretty slick way to setup a frontend. I think a live, persistent usb image is a must for MD6. ;)

Anyway, I did run into two issues. I had the same problem as a previous poster w/ Lirc not starting properly. It's wired because it works like a champ on my other MD5 installs. Anyway, my dirty fix was to add three lines to rc.local
pause 15
rm -f /var/lock/subsys/lir*
service lircd start
(I know a lot of you will roll your eyes at this.)

The only other issue I'm having is w/ DVDs. libdvdcss doesn't seem to be working properly. I have a feeling that maybe the drive from my old tivo is the problem, but it's worked in other systems before. And my other MD5 boxes don't have this issue. Is anyone else having problems w/ xine accessing CSS?

Bottom line so far this install is pretty cool. The only other limitation I've noticed from the USB drive is that suspend (pm-suspend) freaks out when the pc is powered back on. I haven't tested hibernating yet, but I'm not optimistic. I typically have terrible luck w/ suspend/hibernate and Linux. Anyway, thanks again to the MD team for all the hard work.