install Linux (any distro) without a CD drive - UNetBootin

[gator]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNetbootin

I just used this to install debian etch from within windows on an X24. It is amazing! Try it ... you can install any linux distro from within windows (no need to download iso before, but if you have the iso you can use it too). It takes care of everything. You can also install to a USB drive and make it bootable. Once you choose the distro and partiton, it installs a bootloader and asks you to restart the machine. Once you restart you get a screen that lets you boot into UNetbootin or windows. You choose UNetbootin and you start downloading and installing linux (it started the debian netinstall for me without the CD, i guess it will download the equivalent for other distros). It is really useful when you don't have a CD burner or CDs to burn iso images.

Give it a try:
http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/

warning: you need to have a partition for linux before you install.

[Marin85]

That´s a really cool utility. Should I create only one partition for Linux that would be then automatically repartitioned in ext and swap, or should I create two partitions for ext and swap? Provided the first one, does it matter how this partition is formatted or I should preformat it as ext? I´m going to try to install Ubuntu from an iso image. I wonder if striping across multiple HDDs would be supported by UNetbootin (for setting up a software RAID). This would be perfect for my experiment.


Marin