If you choose to create a bootable USB stick, you have to use a dedicated piece of software such as Universal USB Installer or Rufus. Otherwise, you have to burn the image to a disk Boot to live ...

I've done the Live CD/USB, and that worked fine, but for the lack of being able to save data. Persistence is an option, but what I'm really looking for is a full fledged bootable install on a USB ...

I created a bootable USB stick using an Ubuntu 8.10 live CD and the (manual) instructions shown at this guide. This worked great. However, what I'd really like to do is create a multi-booting version ...

Several of the major distributions have had their own way of creating USB stick media for some time now. Ubuntu has their "Startup Disk Creator", which also works on derivatives like Mint, Jolicloud ...