"Netbooks represent a kind of evolutionary convergence of all these trends. These miniature marvels have many features but the defining one is surely the most obvious one. Size. When weight, size and cost are at a premium, fitting optical drives becomes problematical (especially if a conventional hard drive has been fitted in preference to SSDs, reducing space further). That means, to state the obvious, that installing other distros on these machines will require the purloining of an external optical drive. The final leap has now been made with the arrival of bootable USB sticks with persistence thanks to the tools bundled with Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) and Fedora 9 and stand-alone applications like Unetbootin--all of which I touched on in my last article on Ubuntu. Prior to these GUIs, getting a flash to run as a bootable device was not for complete novices or the faint of heart with a phobia about the command line, but if you were bold Pendrivelinux was always there to hold your hand."
