The HP Mini 1000 Mi Edition has one of the most interesting and innovative Linux interfaces found on any netbook. BusinessWeek describes the Mi Edition netbook as running Linux the same way that a TiVo does. In other words, you’d never even know it was Linux if you weren’t paying attention. Because you’re not greeted with a typical operating system desktop and start menu, command line, or dock. Instead when you launch the computer you see a home screen that’s almost cellphone-like with quick access to your music, movies, browser bookmarks, and an internet search bar.

Underneath the shiny program launcher and home screen, the HP Mini 1000 Mi Edition is running Ubuntu 8.04 Linux. And if you want to bring up a terminal window, the Synaptic Package Manager, or other apps you can do that. Mi Edition certainly isn’t perfect. It has a few quirks. But it’s still interesting to at least take for a test drive — even if you don’t actually have an HP Mini 1000. We’ve already seen that it’s possible to install Mi Edition on other netbooks like the Acer Aspire One. But HP’s installer will overwrite any data on your hard drive, which means you’ll need to reinstall Windows, OS X, or your Linux distribution of choice if you decide not to stick with Mi Edition.

But there’s another way. For the last few weeks I’ve been helping Adam McDaniel debug a method for building a LiveUSB with Mi Edition installed. The process takes about 30 to 60 minutes (not counting the time it takes to download the disk image from HP’s servers), and when you’re done you should be able to run Mi Edition from a USB stick, SD card, or other removable storage. This is a persistent installation, which means any files or settings that you change will be stored on the flash card.

Adam is the developer behind the Array kernel for the Asus Eee PC and he’s included some steps in this tutorial for adding support for Eee PC hardware. In other words things like wireless should work out of the box if you’re using an Eee PC 900, 901, or 1000 series netbook. (Update: Adam tells me the steps should be exactly the same for the Acer Aspire One or the MSI Wind U100. If you have another netbooks, odds are that adding the Array kernel will not add wireless support, so you’ll probably want to leave the kernel alone). There are still a few kinks. For instance, I can’t get audio working on my Eee PC 1000H yet, and when I put the netbook to sleep it stubbornly refuses to wake up.

The complete instructions are after the break. You’ll need a computer running Linux (the instructions were written for Ubuntu, but should be similar for other distros), and a 2.5GB or larger USB flash drive or SD card. Keep in mind, we tested these steps on an Eee PC 1000H. While you should be able to load the operating system on netbooks with similar hardware like the Acer Aspire One or MSI Wind U100, some of the hardware, such as the wireless card might not be supported.

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For the past few days I’ve been helping Adam McDaniel debug a system for building a LiveUSB from the HP Mini 1000 Mi Edition installer. Basically, Mi Edition is a custom version of Ubuntu with a slick black theme and a bunch of customizations that make Ubuntu a bit more user friendly for Linux newbies. The installer is available for anyone to download, but the only hardware that’s officially supported is the HP Mini 1000.

As we’ve seen, you can install the operating system on some other netbooks, but you may have problems getting wireless, audio, or other hardware to work properly. The installer also reformats your hard drive, which means you’ll lose any data currently on your netbook if you use the HP installation tool. And that’s where the LiveUSB comes in. It will let you run HP’s Mi Edition operating system from a USB flash drive or an SD card without deleting any data on your hard drive or SSD. This is a persistent install, which means changes will be saved to your flash drive. And with a little tweaking, you could probably follow the same steps to make a dual boot system.

Adam is the developer of the Array kernel for the Eee PC, which adds support for most Eee PC netbooks to the Ubuntu kernel. He’s figured out how to use the same kernel for Mi Edition, which means that not only can you boot Mi Edition from a USB stick, but you can use that stick on a variety of different netbooks with full support for WiFi, audio, the webcam, and other hardware.

We’re still working out a few kinks. For example, after a number of attempts I was finally able to boot the software off an SD card with my Eee PC 1000H this afternoon. But the WiFi module didn’t load automatically. We were able to load it by typing a short command into a terminal window. But ideally the wireless should be available when you boot the computer.

Once we have that issue worked out we’ll publish a complete set of instructions that anyone can follow to make their own LiveUSB. It’s a little complicated, and Adam may wrap the steps into a script later, but until we get some feedback from people using different devices, we want to be careful. Hopefully we’ll be ready to share the details in the next few days. But I was just too excited about this project to hold off on posting a picture of my Eee PC running Mi Edition.