We all know how to hop. This is little different. You need one working live system with web browser, and these commands: wget or curl, dd - the basic, optionally: tee, zcat, xzcat, bzcat, md5sum, sha256sum. And of course second usb pendrive. Live medium for distribution is usually provided in form of hybrid iso image file - which means it can be burned directly into DVD or dd'ed into usb pendrive. Without hard drive there is no room to keep downloaded image. This is resolved with direct dd of image from website say http://remote.org/linux.iso (don't click it - the web does not exists)
here 'wget -O -' means download to stdout, by the way it is default for curl. One more issue I witnessed was check sum verification. Here is my solution
but there is better solution https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...ml#post6245276 My simple solution works - md5sum is being counted on a fly. It happens images are compressed. This is where we need one zcat, xzcat, bzcat. For gzipped compressed image we need to add one more pipe
and put tee /tmp/csum in corresponding place - depending on which checksum for linux.iso,gz or linux.iso we want to calculate. Now story behind. My hadrware configuration are two 8 GB pendrives and one 2 GB pendrive. My basic live system is liveslak. I tried MX Linux, Knoppix 9.1, Knoppix 8.6.1, Liveslak - two different versions, Porteous, last but not least NomadBSD - live system on FreeBSD. At the end: happy hopping - don't brake your neck.

I have timed those sort of download | piped command and here at least they are MUCH SLOWER than a regular download, followed by the piped command.

You may want to edit your original post as my-linux.org is registered, & shows as a dodgy site in chinese.

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Speed is limited by two factors: internet bandwidth and speed of access to usb pendrive. The point is not about speed however. But about lack of storage where you can put downloaded iso. This is why to pipe output of download command to dd directly. Sorry for accidental use of your registered domain - sure I will change it.

Edit: Saving on hard drive wget reports 700 kb/s - and when piping to dd - wget also reports 700 kb/s. There is no gain in time here. wget when working in background creates wget-log file - there you can watch download speed
Perhaps if for you download speed is above 1MB/s - you should try larger values bs=2M or even bs=4M.

I did try varying the dd block size. Funny enough, the one that gave the fastest results on files of a few gigs was 65536.

I don't think the wget slowed - it was the xz-d |dd bit that slowed. My download speed is usually most of 35 Mbps.

You've changed it to another registered domain.

Make it example.org and you'll be using a domain that will never be registered because it's an officially designated domain for use in examples.

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So image was compressed - but this does not happen often.

Even if you don't have a hard drive, part of the RAM can be accessed as a quasi-hard-drive filesystem.
That's what I would choose.

5 GB size ram-disk? At least. If I would have Cray computer I wouldn't bother at all.

Pen drives are not really intended to be used for this purpose. They are fast on reads but slow on writes. However, USB-connected external hard drives can be had at any office-supply store (2TB or so) for about $80 USD. If your computer has a USB-C interface (or the old FireWire), they're very fast. They typically draw all their power from the interface (no external "bricks" to plug into the wall), and are not much bigger than a pack of playing cards. Simply reformat and re-partition them with the filesystem(s) of your choice.

Easily, the best thing to do is to use VirtualBox, the "absolutely-free virtual machine monitor that runs on everything." Format the external drive with a Linux filesystem, then use VirtualBox to create "virtual disks" for each guest that you want to run on that filesystem. Now, you can thoroughly evaluate any "distro" at your leisure.