What propelled me to do this was simple: my HP Mini book had a “disk” failure and the operating system was unavailable. The problem with the HP netbook is that the restore CDs are …CDs! And the netbook has no CD of course. I tried various ways to get them onto a USB, but without much success.
Eventually this is what I did. I went here http://www.ubuntu.com/netbook and after being convinced this was a good idea, I followed this: http://www.ubuntu.com/netbook/get-ubuntu/download. It worked mostly well, save for my wireless. I needed to connect directly to the Internet via a cable, then install network drivers (the proprietary wireless broadcom driver. It’s the STA, not the b43). Then I needed to shutdown and restart the netbook and the wireless came on. I had to play around with it, but eventually I got it to work. That part required some patience.
Ubuntu gets installed on a USB pen drive, so you need one of those. It also uses some software called the Universal-USB-Installer. That worked well for me. However I found another software package, UNetbootin, that worked well for some other distros of Linux like Puppy. Both are worth a look.
I never went back to Windows XP. By the way, I had used a software package called MagicISO to turn my HP CDs into ISO files to burn to a USB drive. However, I was not able to boot from those USB drives this way: not sure why. Nonetheless, while I like XP, I am happy to move on.
Smart People I Know 