Yesterday I spent some hours to play AROS. To make a USB boot disk, I use QEMU to install AROS from iso to the usb, the command is qemu-system-i386 -enable-kvm -cdrom aros.iso -hda /dev/sdb -boot d. Then I can boot the USB disk on my Thinkpad R50e, and also run the installer from there to install it into the harddisk. The iso doesn't include many programs, which can be found in its contrib offer. The contrib is provided as a tarball, to make them available, I make an iso from its contents, and then copy it in qemu from CDROM: to AROS: via qemu. sh shell is available, so does cp. One problem I found is that gcc can not be executed, reports syntax error, later I'll see if it's just missing executable permission or actually bugs...
Well AROS is not very stable, it crashes several times during my tests. It has a SDK with GCC, coreutils, and a familiar sh, I have mixed feeling about this. Okay, maybe I'll port some programs to AROS to waste more time, heh...