What I want to do is take any random .iso file I download, "burn" it to a flash drive and then boot and install whatever distro is currently on the flash drive onto the computer I'm using. Currently I want to install Ubuntu 6.06 and have ubuntu-6.06.1-alternate-i386.iso. I've looked all over and done plenty of googling but can only find information on how to install an os onto the flash drive and this is not what I want to do. I'm fairly new to the *nix,bsd OS world and am always wanting to try something new and think being able to use a flash drive will save me the hassle of having a bunch of random os cd's as well as keep me from installing old versions of os's. I know I've had an issue with trying to burn a cd iso onto a dvd, will I run into the same problem when trying write a cd iso to a flash drive? Anyone else had any luck doing this? Are there any tools out there that will help me do this? Thanks in advance for any help.

I found this linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?t=225467 (sorry, I can't post complete urls just yet) about 5 mins after I created this thread. But I do not want to have to worry about a network install. I would like to do a full install from my usb drive.

Are the distros you are installing from the flash drive, live cd's or installation cd's. Most live cd's will contain scripts that will install the OS to the hard drive for you. If it's a installation cd it will a setup screen that will automatically detect your hard drive(s) and then you can install to which ever you choose.

I want to use a full install cd, not a live cd. The problem is that you can't just drag and drop the iso file onto the flash drive and then boot the computer from it. What I would like to know is how can I "burn" the iso image onto a flash drive and boot from it. This is exactly the same thing as burning the iso image to disk and then booting from it, except with a usb flash drive. The problem is that there doesn't seem to be an equivalent to opening up nero or whatever and selecting burn image to disk and that is what I would like to accomplish.

Actually, you can if you have a Knoppix cd.
Just use the option:
Which should help a bit.

But lets say I happen to want to try FreeBSD or maybe Slackware. Is there a more universal way of "burning" the images onto a flash drive and then boot and install from it? And since I'm pretty much a noob when it comes to this, when you just say, "use the option: x" I don't know what you mean or how to do what you're suggesting.