most of the laptops that people are buying on the market today have no cd drive so it makes it more challenging to install the stuff on a notebook without buysing a pre made one, i don't think that laptops or any other system will boot from a usb flash drive like it would from a cd

just wondering though and these notebooks cost like $200

So, your question is what?
How to easily install about 95% of all distro's via usb, as even computers that won't boot from usb can be made
to do so, if you have a cdrom or floppy, either external or otherwise.

What lappy are you speaking of?

Are you talking about netbooks? I used a USB CD-ROM drive to install Slackware on my netbook (Acer Aspire One), but you can also boot from a USB disk.

Modern ones do.
My Asus EEE701 certainly does.

oh i didn't know that glad i asked

btw how do i make a flash drive be like a live cd sometimes cds don't work out since my cd drives have been known to dail flash drive seems alot more reliable

You should look at the installation instructions for whichever distro you choose. You'll most likely find the information you're after there.

Also, please use punctuation in your posts as it makes them easier to read.

sorry i posted that last reply with my psp

anyway sometimes the installation stalls and i leave the thing running for hours and nothing happens (any longer the power bill will be worth a fortune)

at this point i don't think it's the cd drive at all (i checked the disk for scratches and there isn't a severe scratch to be seen)heres how they act

ubuntu: after i insert the cd it boots into the main menu i choose install ubuntu and it goes into a spalsh screen sorta (kinda like windows spash screen with the line below the logo moving from left to right) in this case i saw the ubuntu logo and a line at the bottom with some sorta dot moving from side to side,then after it has passed the splash screen i see a line blinking in the top left corner of the screen for a few minutes, then i see the verbose bootup (kinda like when the system boots pclinuxos, with the progress bar and press esc to see all the text, after all of that passes the monitor clicks goes black and doesn't do anything (could it be my video card or is my computer just plain incompatible, i tried it on a mother board from an old hp pavillion 6330 and it viewed the desktop no problem too bad the system wasn't able to run it properly)

opensuse: after i insert the cd and boot up the machine the main menu comes up as expected, i chose livecd bootup, then the next screen shows the usunbtu logo ontop of a cd with a progress bar to the right of it and it doesn't seem to move at all even after a couple hours, what could be the delemma here

mandriva one: as allways i inserted the livecd it showed me a progress bar when it booted up (kinda like what happened when i installed pclinuxos) then i went into boot livecd then i see a progress bar again and this time it doesn't move for hours

i have been installing these distros with a dvd-rw is this not a good thing to i have to use an actual cd or dvd (i installed pclinuxos on a dvd-r and it went perfectly, in burned the livecd image for ubuntu on the same kind of dvd and what i stated above happened no difference from what happened with the dvd-rw)

Hey baronbeefdip

you could always net-install them
or install from usb

the problems your having sound graphics card related

could you post the specs on your computer?
also, yes using dvd-rw is not gonna work too good.

so, if we figure out the screen problems
the question will really be
How Many distro's can I put on my no cdrom lappy???
Many

I got 9 on my 4gb usb now

actually i was talking about my desktop (kinda off topic though still want an answer) and yes i'll be glad to post my system specs


amd athlon (tm) processor
1.40 ghz 512mb ram

NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS/GeForce2 Pro