Booting from usb, What brands/models work best?

[rokytnji]

dose anyone know of a way to just do the full install on the pny flash drive with out any of the live stuff? (I dont think any one who boots from usb wants to do the live stuff...)

You will need some sort of media to install whatever Linux to your PNY Flash drive whether via CDROM, USB Flash,CF Flash,SD Flash (as far as I have done it). There is a method called From Iso but I have never tried it.

Not PNY. Not Ubuntu. Not USB. But this is how I did it.
And I run Macpup on USB. And AntiX on SD. Both capable of saving changes. Both though on a Asus EEEPC 900.

when live install was selected, got past B&W logo to freeze at a blank screen

By your sig I see you run Linux for awhile. You don't think it might be a video issue maybe freezing instead of USB Flash drive maybe? Anyhows sorry it aint Ubuntu or PNY
http://yatsite.blogspot.com/2009/07/...s-eee-900.html

[miniyak]

might be a video issue, but ubuntu has always said yes to my gpu before... plus it did work once

I ended up installing a distro to the drive called "super ubuntu" using unetbootin.. this almost works perfectly, apparently there is some way to keep applications/files on it but haven't really got around to really messing w/ it.

super ubuntu seems to be base on 9.04 at the moment and has alot of applications included with it that I would consider staples. Like the start-up manager for instance.

I also read on the topic on doing full installs on flash drives. The one important thing to note is doing this reduces the life of the drive. This is prob. why developers are so preoccupied w/ doing live usbs vs. regular installs.

Of course running puppy of a flash drive would be a completely different story. I might conceder trying this in the future