I have installed Ubuntu from a thumb drive and it was pretty smooth and easy. I did it once because I had no CD drive on a netbook and wanted Ubuntu Netbook Remix, and another time on a laptop with a flakey CD drive. The thing is, I used Ubuntu on another machine to make the USB, but I want to tell a friend far away using only Windows how he can do this. Do you know of good instructions on how to make the Ubuntu installation thumb drive from a Windows box? By the way, a young guy with a BA in Math told me he wanted to be a scientist so I told him that step #1 was to get rid of Windows, use Ubuntu and start learning R, bash, emacs, and so on. I think Python would be a good idea too, but he's working mostly on stats right now and we don't want to do everything at once. Funny thing is he already was using OpenOffice, GIMP, Firefox/Tbird and a bunch of other free software under Windows, so he has no real Windows-dependency problem. He's the guy who needs the thumb drive. Mike