The first step to running the Universal USB Installer is to chose the Linux distribution you want to install onto the flash drive from the list of supported distributions.

You should download the ISO file for your preferred Linux distribution ahead of time.

Ubuntu 10.10 took up 692 megabytes on my flash drive.

This is certainly possible, my experience has been that having a few extra folders does not interfere with Ubuntu running from the flash drive. Any more seems wasteful, unless you want to store other files on the drive. The flash drive should be at least two gigabytes.Files on the flash drive before starting the installation, are not wiped out when Linux is installed.The installer program used to be able to format the drive for you, but this feature has been removed. The flash drive needs to be formatted with the FAT32 file system.The Universal USB Installer runs under Windows XP, Vista and 7.You are much better off reading about the Universal USB Installer from the source. The bad news is that Canonical's documentation is far from complete. I've used it in the past, from within Windows, with good success. Thankfully, Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, now seems to have endorsed the Universal USB Linux Installer available at. This was documented poorly and failed as often as it succeeded. In the old days, I used to create a CD, boot to it and then use the included Startup Disk Creator from within Ubuntu to create a bootable copy on a USB flash drive. I was pleasantly surprised that the Ubuntu download page now includes instructions for installing the system onto a USB flash from Windows, OS X and, of course, Ubuntu.

My USB flash drive with Linux was getting a bit old, so I set out to create a new one with the latest version (10.10) of Ubuntu.

How to install linux from usb drive