installing/running linux on flashdrive WITHOUT CD??

Its me with another goofy question. This isn't necessarily aspire one related, but I think you guys could help me out. I've been reading about different distros on a flash drive (DSL, flash puppy, etc.), and it seems that all of them require burning the download onto a CD before I can install it onto the flash drive. I guess this COULD be an aspire one question. anyway, how can I bypass the CD-ROM requirement?

 

if you have 2 usb sticks you can copy to one, boot from it and install on the other, or
with opensuse ( and may be other ) you can install via internet after used a small image
on the usb-stick

 

Download the iso file for the distro, and use unetbootin to put it on a USB stick.
Unetbootin has a drop-down menu where you can select the most popular distros, and it takes care of everything including the download.
If your distro of choice isn't on the list, it can use an already downloaded iso file.

Unetbootin is opensource and available for both windows and Linux.
http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/

 

alright, thanks. but a couple of questions regarding this... is Unetbootin usually a faster download than downloading from the web? I'm on dialup, and I'm downloading openSUSE, and its been about 10 minutes, and its already half way finished.. it just doesn't make sense..

Also, I don't think this will work, but can I save multiple OS's on a single flash drive? the reason i don't think it will work is because when you boot from a CD, you don't have an option of boot ubuntu, boot openSUSE, boot fedora, etc.. I was hoping I could get either a big flash drive, or external hard drive, and save a bunch of distros on it, and switch up whenever I feel like it. just in the past 6 months, I've used Ubuntu, Linux Mint, and gOS, and I want to test out others to find "that perfect one"