There is more than one way to install a Gnu/Linux distro into a PC/laptop. Gnu/Linux can be installed in various ways to a hard disk -- using a CD/DVD, from network, through flash drives, etc. Almost every six months new and improved version of distro are released. Be it Canonical's Ubuntu or Redhat's Fedora, we find a stable distro released every six months and quite a number of alpha and beta version being released before the stable release.

If you are a Linux enthusiasts and if you try and test most of the release and report the bugs, then you need quite a number of CD to burn all the ditros; or else you need re-writable CD/DVD to do the job. But, lately every distro which is released comes with a Live iso. The advantage of the Live iso is, it can boot your system without actually getting installed into the hard drive. Hence, the users' can try the distro and in case they feel it serves their purpose then they can go for the installation.

UNetbootin, aka Universal Netboot Installer is cross platform software; hence runs on Linux, Windows and Mac. Unetbootin help create Live USB systems, through which various Linux distributions can be installed without using a CD/DVD. UNetbootin supports various distribution out-of-the-box -- Ubuntu, Fedora, ArchLinux, Mandriva, openSUSE, Parted Magic, Frugalware, and many others.

Well, when you launch the UNetbootin (Fig 1) it gives a lot of options, using which you can create a live usb drive. It offers three options -- 'distribution', 'diskimag' and 'custom'. Any one of them can be used to create a live usb drive. If you do not have the image of the distro which you want to install, then choose 'distribution' option as that will download the iso and create the live image. So, select the distro and the version and also select the Type: as USB Drive and Drive option and press OK. Wait for a while and the USB live disk will be created(Fig 2). If you have the distro image, chose the 'diskimag' option and browse the image which you want to install and then select the 'Type: as USB Drive' and Drive and press OK. It will take a while and the live usb disk will be created.

Fig 1: UNetbootin default
 

Fig 2: Downloading and installing into the USB Flash drive

System Requirement

Any Linux System. If you are using Windows, preferably Windows 2000 through Windows 7. A Internet connection, in case you do not have the iso download.