If you have unetbootin then it should work perfectly as I built a USB drive and installed XFCE less than

an hour ago. Make sure that the USB is formatted as FAT32, then run unetbootin. Also, make sure that the MD5 checksum of the .iso file is correct before you do this. if you are coming from windows download Win32disk image (google it) if you are using ubuntu or any debian based distro go to the terminal and CODE: SELECT ALL sudo apt-get install unetbootin then go to systems and look for unetbootin .. put usb flash disk, direct it to where the iso is and press ok well im relatively new to the Linux scene and have been searching for a distribution that I could transition easily with good progress and lack of bloat-ware. I enjoy this build and have had one heck of a time getting this set-up over the past three days. Newer to Linux but not new to computers. Here is what I did: System is a dell mini 9 netbook running windows xp home on the ssd. I have 2 8gb flash drives(one sony micro vault, another kingston datatravler and both old and under 20 dollars) 1. downloaded the latest version from this site and used Unetbootin to mount the iso on the Kingston flash drive. 2. rebooted and set bios boot device to boot to USB first then hard drive. there is also an option for this laptop to hit the "0" key to select the boot device which I also used. The USB live version booted right up. 3. once fully booted, I put in the second flash drive(which had clean fat32 format from windows) and started the install process on the desktop. 4. select the language, timezone, and keyboard settings, for partition I selected advance. and made my partitions on the usb drive not doing anything to other drives. I did 3gb ext3 for "/", 3gb for "/home", and remaining for "swap". I doubt that plays a big factor and could have done the automatic with selecting the proper drive from the drop down menu as to not affect my windows drive and boot. next 5. after reboot I removed the Live USB and ran into the typical series of common errors like 25, 21,17 while booting and tinkering with boot options. even getting past this part once leading to a "inittamfs" command prompt telling me the drive was hanging up and "permission denied" when trying to access any of the /dev/sdb1 commands and such. 6. from here it was following how my computer booted and installed the drives. others will be different but here is how mine worked. In the live version my windows default computer hard drive was /dev/sda and the live USB was /dev/sdb and my sony usb install was showing up at /dev/sdd (i reformated the drive just prior from a previous install which was /dev/sdc). Success came from editing the boot setting lines to ROOT (hd0,0) and the other kernel line to read /dev/sdb1 instead of /dev/sdd1 and selecting boot from that line. 7. This allowed me to boot properly and then I went in and changed the device.map and menu.lst to properly reflect proper boot order and continue to do it each start. I am now able to restart and retain settings as well as boot right to windows without any usb connected easily. Hopes this helps because over the past few days I have lurked every possible forum for tweaks or ideas that I could apply to my problem. I am currently typing this from the computer itself and I am actually impressed with the speed for a USB supported system and will do some downsizing of unnecessary things to increase it more.

here is my old "device.map" file (hd0) /dev/sda (hd1) /dev/sdb (hd2) /dev/sdd and my new one (hd0) /dev/sdb (hd1) /dev/sda (hd2) /dev/sdd Here is my old "menu.lst" file info ## ## End Default Options ## title Linux Mint 7 Gloria XFCE, kernel 2.6.28-11-generic root (hd2,0) kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.28-11-generic root=/dev/sdd1 ro quiet splash initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.28-11-generic quiet title Linux Mint 7 Gloria XFCE, kernel 2.6.28-11-generic (recovery mode) root (hd2,0) kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.28-11-generic root=/dev/sdd1 ro single initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.28-11-generic title Linux Mint 7 Gloria XFCE, memtest86+ root (hd2,0) kernel /boot/memtest86+.bin quiet ### END DEBIAN AUTOMAGIC KERNELS LIST # This is a divider, added to separate the menu items below from the Debian # ones. title Other operating systems: root

# This entry automatically added by the Debian installer for a non-linux OS # on /dev/sda2 title Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition rootnoverify (hd0,1) savedefault chainloader +1 Here is my changes for the new one ## ## End Default Options ## title Linux Mint 7 Gloria XFCE, kernel 2.6.28-11-generic root (hd0,0) kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.28-11-generic root=/dev/sdb1 ro quiet splash initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.28-11-generic quiet

title Linux Mint 7 Gloria XFCE, kernel 2.6.28-11-generic (recovery mode) root (hd0,0) kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.28-11-generic root=/dev/sdb1 ro single initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.28-11-generic title Linux Mint 7 Gloria XFCE, memtest86+ root (hd0,0) kernel /boot/memtest86+.bin quiet ### END DEBIAN AUTOMAGIC KERNELS LIST # This is a divider, added to separate the menu items below from the Debian # ones. title Other operating systems: root

# This entry automatically added by the Debian installer for a non-linux OS # on /dev/sda2 title Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition rootnoverify (hd1,1) savedefault chainloader +1 I changed the drive for the windows xp too so I could access windows through the splash screen with the pen drive in.