In what will be music to netbook owners, the latest release of Debian Linux — most suited for netbooks due to its light requirements — can be copied directly to a USB stick for installation.
Owners of netbooks, cheap notebooks that don’t always have a CD-drive, had been at a disadvantage as far Debian was concerned as the downloaded linux CD-file could not be written to a USB stick. Fedora was one of the first distributions to implement the feature, followed by Mandriva, Ubuntu and OpenSuse more than a year ago.
However, Debian and Centos are more suitable for netbooks, primarily because of the highly efficient and refined designs unlike bleeding-edge distributions like Fedora and Ubuntu. The latter are usually too heavy to be run on hardware-constrained netbooks.
Centos, based on Red Hat enterprise linux, is yet to have USB-based install capacity.
The Squeeze CD file can be copied to a USB or Pen Drive using the ‘dd’ command.