Being able to boot from a flash drive is quite handy at times (for example if you need to rescue some files from a dead computer). Recently I tried a utility designed to make a bootable flash drive. This utility lets you install any of several different Linux versions on a flash drive quite easily. The software, unetbootin, is really easy to use. I’ve got Ubuntu running from my flash drive now (DSL is another favorite of mine).
http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/