Hey Supergrover and others I was using this guide to make a usb drive bootable for a Linux install and it is a nice little guide but if you are using linux there is this program here that will download the necessary files and set them up for a bootable thumbdrive all in one step. might be a nice idea if its only for a Linux install.
It's called unetbootin and can be found here
Lubi, LVPM, UNetbootin, and Bubakup - UNetbootin it also lets you choose from a long list of distros
just thought I'd drop this here for any noob with linux like me :)