The last time I needed to install Ubuntu on a system without a CD drive, my Eee PC, I created a bootable USB drive to run the graphical installer. The UNetbootin tool I used makes creating the USB system simple, but in Ubuntu 8.10 theres an even easier way.

The easiest way to create a bootable USB drive on Linux or Windows is to use UNetbootin. Follow this simple howto to create a bootable FreeDOS flash drive.

This guide shows how you can create USB startup disks (on your USB flash drive) from various Linux distributions with UNetbootin. This is useful if you want to install a Linux distribution on a computer that has no CD/DVD drive.

UNetbootin allows you to easily adapt a Linux CD image to boot off of a USB flash drive or memory card. Have a system without a CD drive? Create a bootable USB drive to run your Linux installer.

A common issue with a Netbook is that they do not have a CDROM so that you must load the operating system from a flash drive. UNetbootin, the Universal Netbook Installer does an excellent job at creating an image to put on your flash drive so you can install it on your Netbook.

In Linux For Absolute Beginners: 3 Easy Ways to Test-Drive Linux I reviewed some simple ways to safely test-drive Linux. All of them involved selecting a Linux distribution to try, then downloading and burning it to a CD. Anyone can learn how to install Linux in different ways, such as dual-booting, standalone on a single PC, or in a virtual machine.

These days, it only takes an increasingly-cheap USB thumb drive and a program like UNetbootin to create a portable Linux desktop you can run on any computer that can boot from a USB port.

You can install and run Ubuntu from within Windows without any risk of accidentally deleting your existing programs and files by using Wubi, an unofficial Ubuntu installer for Windows users.

UNetbootin is a tool that allows you to install various Linux distributions (Ubuntu, Fedora, Mandriva, OpenSuSE, Debian, ArchLinux) from a Windows or a Linux desktop over the internet (i.e., you don't need to burn the Ubuntu, Fedora, ... CDs). Unlike the Ubuntu installation with Wubi, real partitions are created during the installation.