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So you got a bunch of different openSUSE 12.2/Ubuntu live isos downloaded, to test them on a real machine you have to either burn them to CD/DVD or create live USB stick. Creating CD/DVD is a total waste after booting it once or twice.Creating bootable USB stick is a better thing to do, however openSUSE Hybrid iso creates USB stick that is not usable for any other purpose and the remaining space is locked till you make another partition, and even then the partition is not available on windows(tm).

Unetbootin is nice utility that can create bootable usb stick with vfat partition so the stick can be used to carry other data, however it is also limited in a sense that there cannot be more than 1 bootable image on it unless you know what exactly you need to edit. Other thing is that unetbootin no longer works with openSUSE live isos.

Thanks to a nice isofrom feature in KIWI, here is the solution that can create bootable live USB stick on a fat partition. Huge advantage in using this is ability to add as many live CD/DVD isos you like on a stick, so you may have openSUSE-Edu*.iso, openSUSE-12.2-KDE*.iso, openSUSE-12.2-GNOME*.iso, something-from-susestudio*.iso or Ubuntu-xz.iso all on one usb stick, with a nice graphical menu to boot from. Unlike openSUSE Imagewriter or Unetbootin, the stick has whole iso images not a bunch or files that cannot be used for anything else.

The code is here which you can fork and send in improvements or support for your distribution's live iso, it would be nice if Unetbootin/Imagewriter devs integrate this feature.

Install via 1-click on openSUSE 12.2. The script should work on any Linux distribution, needs syslinux package installed, get it from the code link, save it in $PATH, make it executable to run, however only recent openSUSE and Ubuntu isos are supported at this moment, but support for other distribution that has isofrom cmdline feature(Debian may be) would be easy.

For instructions on how to use this script, run as root (su -) sh /path/to/live-fat-stick -h or just live-fat-stick -h if you have installed via package and have the script executable in your $PATH.