I don’t use vanilla Ubuntu much any more. It generally requires more powerful hardware than I am willing to provide, and is generally headed in a direction I don’t want to go.
It is occasionally useful though, as a live environment in certain situations. It’s rare, but it’s true. I sometimes fall back on it.
In most situations though, all I want is a way to quickly boot into the live environment from a USB stick, and discard it when I’m done.
So ideally, a live environment that I can boot straightaway would be ideal. For example, the Arch Linux ISO just needs written straight to a drive with dd, and it will boot perfectly.
Ubuntu ISOs won’t do that. From the live environment there is a way to create a bootable USB disk, but to do that I’d need to install Ubuntu or boot the live environment from CD.
And that’s more or less what I’m trying to avoid. I don’t want to burn a CD, or install it … just dd, boot and be done.
So that’s why for the past year or so I’ve put up plain-jane USB sticks written from live Ubuntu runs. These are identical to the results you’d get if you used that same tool yourself, and wrote it to a 1Gb stick.
With these, you can download the file, write it straight to a device with
dd if=ubuntu-x.xx-desktop-i386.img of=/dev/sdXY
where X and Y are your drive assignment labels, and reboot. You don’t need to install Ubuntu, or burn a CD of it, or rely on a third party tool like unetbootin (which is awesome stuff, by the way).
Just for fun, and because I wanted to, and because it’s a free world, and because I wanted them, I made images in the same style for Ubuntu 8.04.4, Ubuntu 8.10, Ubuntu 9.04 and Ubuntu 9.10. The image for 10.04 is here, and for 10.10 is here.
These have all been tested in the same style, and worked fine for me. Just for the record, they were all made with the creator’s option to discard files on shutdown, rather than allocate space for saving.
So there you are. Enjoy. 🙂
P.S.: I have rotten luck working with LinuxTracker. If for some reason you can download the torrent but see no traffic, leave me a note and I’ll try again in the morning. 🙄
Motho ke motho ka botho 
Huh? I thought all Ubuntu Live CD isos could be written and booted with dd?
I tried a day ago with a fresh ISO, and it didn’t. I believe the netbook versions will, but I don’t care much for Ubuntu, let alone the netbook version.
In any case, ISOs as far back as April 2008 definitely don’t.
Dropping to a virtual terminal won’t work? Hmm.
Well I generally use a guide for putting grub2 on a usb flashdrive (done from linux) and then I past the iso files in the root directory. Once thats complete I just edit a simple text file and anything will boot. You can find it here http://goo.gl/AiOfL .
For anything that is Debian based I use ubuntu’s startup disk creator.
Hope this helps. dd is simpler but only works one at a time. I am sure you prefer it because some of your machines don’t work with large usb drives but I thought it might help.
Doesn’t Ubuntu use isohybrid? (Part of latest syslinux/isolinux)
Whoops, sorry for double post.
# isohybrid filename.iso
# dd if=/path-to-iso-file/nameoffile.iso of=/dev/sdx