I use the Plop boot manager and that's supposed to force computers to boot from a flash drive and they still don't boot from it. I think DVDs are fine if you have a DVD drive, but I'm buying an Ultrabook soon and it doesn't have one. Is it true only newer devices can boot from a flash drive?
It definitely depends on the computer (specifically the BIOS), but also, what kind of flash drive is it?
If it is a USB flash drive, then your computer needs to support booting from USB storage devices. Some computers support booting from USB Floppy drives, and you can trick a USB flash drive into behaving like one (requires special partitioning).
If you flash drive is a CompactFlash drive, then you'd need a CompactFlash-to-IDE adapter in your computer, but then, the CF flash card is presented to the system as a regular hard drive (e.g. /dev/sda) and can be treated as such.
Edit: Be sure to go into your BIOS and look for a menu item named Boot Order or similar, where you will hopefully be able to move "Boot from USB storage" (or whatever it calls it, if there) to the top. Sometimes, during normal boot-up, you can just press a key (like F12) to display a boot-menu, where you can select from which device to boot.
I, too, have a BIOS that doesn't support booting from usb. However, I have been successfully using the Plop boot manager to do just that. It works perfectly for me. My guess is that maybe your usb drive isn't formatted correctly to make it bootable. You can't just copy the files from the .iso file.
I don't use cd's any more to boot/install linux on my usb 1.1 Laptops that don't support usb boot in bios. There are lot's of ways to install Linux. Plop has worked for me on my IBM A22M. Pretty ancient Laptop.
Other ways.
Edit: Forgot about this. http://macpup.org/forums/index.php/t...g30.html#msg30