In my situation, I had somehow bricked my 770. When I first bought my 770 in April, I had to flash it with the most recent update, and I used XP. For the 2006 beta, I successfully used the Mac OS X flasher. But when I tried flashing the new 2006 OS two days ago, I ignored the release notes and tried both XP and OS X flashers and ended up with a tablet that XP wouldn't recognize at all, and that OS X said had an unusable USB board (or something like that).

So, my only hope at that point was to find a way to install Linux on one of my machines so I could try flashing it that way.

Running Ubuntu from a LiveCD is a little elaborate, I'll agree, but in my case it was my only hope for restoring my 770.