Creating a Linux Live USB stick: Big win for Fedora (Shallow Thoughts)

Creating a Linux Live USB stick: Big win for Fedora

Three times now I've gotten myself into a situation where I was trying to install Ubuntu and for some reason couldn't burn a CD. So I thought hey, maybe I can make a bootable USB image on this handy thumb drive here. And spent the next three hours unsuccessfully trying to create one. And finally gave up, got in the car and went to buy a new CD burner or find someone who could burn the ISO to a CD because that's really the only way you can install or run Ubuntu.

There are tons of howtos on the web for creating live USB sticks for Ubuntu. Almost all of them start with "First, download the CD image and burn it to a CD. Now, boot off the CD and ..."

The few that don't discuss apps like usb-creator-gtk or unetbootin tha work great if you're burning the current Ubuntu Live CD image from a reasonably current Ubuntu machine, but which fail miserably in every other case (wildly pathological cases like burning the current Ubuntu alternate installer CD from the last long-term-support version of Ubuntu. I mean, really, should that be so unusual?)

Tonight, I wanted a bootable USB of Fedora 12. I tried the Ubuntu tools already mentioned, but usb-creator-gtk won't even try with an image that isn't Ubuntu, and unetbootin wrote something but the resulting stick didn't boot.

I asked on the Fedora IRC channel, where a helpful person pointed me to this paragraph on copying an ISO image with dd.

Holy mackerel! One command:

dd if=Fedora-12-i686-Live.iso of=/dev/sdf bs=8M

and in less than ten minutes it was ready. And it booted just fine!

Really, Ubuntu, you should take a look at Fedora now and then. For machines that are new enough, USB boot is much faster and easier than CD burning -- so give people an easy way to get a bootable USB version of your operating system. Or they might give up and try a distro that does make it easy.

Tags: linux, install, fedora, ubuntu
[ 23:01 Mar 27, 2010    More linux/install | permalink to this entry | ]