Good day, I downloaded Tails, 1.1, and made a bootable live USB stick. It's an 8GB Dolphin 3.0 USB Memory stick. I tried booting from it on two computers. The first a 32 bit desktop, Asus eee. It gives a message about and does not proceed to the start menu... just the black screen and print.

It also will not boot up on a 64 bit Dell desktop. Inspirion Zino HD.

To make the USB, I used software found in Mint. "Open with disk image mounter". I used the stick straight from the package no formatting.

The Tails version was from it's own website. I did not cryptographically check it.

How can I get Tails up and running?

I downloaded tails as an iso. I loaded it on a dvd with k3b, and that offers you "You're putting an iso in this disk. Do you want to burn the image directly?"
I say yes, and that's bootable.

There's a whole lot of stuff on the website about usb sticks in downloads/ known issues

or just use dd.

Before I use dd, do I need to format the USB stick?
And, how does one find the image, or name the image to find to burn?

OK I solved the problem by adding software to unetbootin, it lacked was it, extlink, it would at start up tell me, then I formatted the USB memory with fat32 and it was simple, it goes.

Make the partition,then did onto the partition - onto e.g. /dev/sdd1 or whatever the drive is, and not onto /dev/add, which over writes the partition table.

I've found that my HP EliteBook will not even attempt to load the USB ISO Tails Live OS. I've tried different formatting first, and it won't even make it to the Grub to try there, it just permanently hangs. I tried with a brand new USB stick, but same result. Yet, I CAN usethat same USB stick to boot other images, so all BIOS settings & everything are righton.

RonJeanJr, some .isos can be written directly with dd, others require a program like unetbootin.
please refer to the tails online documentation on how to create a bootable usb medium.