Creating a Bootable USB the hassle free way

There are a lots of softwares available for making bootable and live USB's but they all fail at one distro or another. So here is a magic bullet that fits all. All you need is a bootable OR live distro's iso image file. If you have a live distro you'd get a live USB, if you only have bootable iso image you would get a bootable USB only. First locate your USB

sudo fdisk -l

Then run this, replace path-to-iso with the path to where the iso file is on your disk and the ? with drive letter for your USB

dd if=/path-to-iso of=/dev/sd?

Example

dd if=/home/me/ubu.iso of=/dev/sdc

Note: Do not include the numeric number e.g. its /dev/sdc and NOT /dev/sdc1!

How to check your ISO file for consistency before buring it to disc or using it

When you download a large file from the Internet there are chances that the file might be corrupted during download. In order to be sure that the download is not corrupt, you can always check its md5sum.
In case of Ubuntu you can check the md5 sum of the downloaded ISO using

md5sum ubuntu-11.10-desktop-i386.iso

Then you can compare this with the md5sum available on the website, from where you downloaded the ISO.