If you’ve been looking for a chance to try out Sugar Labs’ fresh new take on the user interface — without mucking about in your machine’s internals — the project has a new option for you: Sugar on a Stick.

Sugar on a Stick is based on a custom build of Fedora Linux with Sugar layered on top. It works with Windows, Mac, or Linux computers, although Macs (and some PCs with and older BIOS) will need to boot first from a “helper CD.” After that, it’s all Sugar all the time. The USB stick holds a persistent copy of the filesystem, so unlike a LiveCD any documents created or changed settings will still be around the next time you fire up Sugar.

Most famous for its inclusion on One Laptop Per Child’s XO computer, Sugar is a task- and collaboration-based user interface that dispenses with common computing concepts like file management, windows, and menus. Instead, the user interface consists of full screen applications, ubiquitous collaboration features, and a unique “journal” metaphor for file tracking.

It’s a bold new concept in UI design, and perhaps a way for us to move away from computer conventions like file system management and the desktop interface metaphor that, while revolutionary in their time, have gotten increasingly clunky with age. While the UI was designed for use by schoolchildren, many have praised it for offering a fresh computing experience.

Sugar has been praised by some bloggers for its no-nonsense, easy UI, and its journaling features, task-based UI, and stripped-down application loadout might make it an attractive option for writers or other users looking for an alternative OS that helps them focus more closely on the task at hand. Sugar might also be an intriguing alternative UI for the emerging netbook computer category.

The link above will take you to the Sugar Labs Wiki, which contains all the instructions you’ll need to get Sugar on a Stick up and running.

(Via Lifehacker.)

Mega-ouch: Gizmodo reports that 0% of teens want to get a Zune in the next year, while 100% of teens want an iPod.

Though numbers this dramatic should be taken with a grain of salt, they don’t offer much hope to Microsoft, Sansa, or any of the thousand other hardware manufacturers who have been trying for years, with varying degrees of success, to craft the perfect “iPod killer.” Clearly, they need to go back to the drawing board — like a Stephanie Meyer vampire, the iPod seems extremely difficult to kill.

These numbers come from Piper Jaffray’s biannual Teen Survey (in its eighth year) and show that the iPod has 100% of teens’ attention. It’s worth noting that previous iterations of the survey showed single- or (occasionally) double-digit interest in other devices. Not so anymore. It’s flabbergasting, but 0% of teens wanted anything else as their next player — even those who already owned an iPod competitor.

It’s unfathomable that Apple will stay number one forever. However, at this point it seems the only way for them to lose their market-leader position will be for the PMP market to transform so dramatically that the iPod no longer fulfills customers core needs. Until that happens, Apple will be sitting pretty — on top of a giant pile of money.