Creating bootable USB drives were a pain in the early days. You would have heard that only geeks knew how to do that. Well, it was not a rocket science but not a stuff everyone was aware of. Nowadays, we have a lot of USB bootable creator programs and one of the easiest to use is – UNetbootin.
Create Bootable USB Linux using UNetbootin: UNetbootin was a Windows-only program for creating bootable Linux Pendrive. However, now you can utilize it on a Linux-powered machine as well (like Ubuntu) from Github. It is a free bootable image creator. UNetbootin allows you to create bootable Live USB drives for Ubuntu, Fedora, and other Linux distributions without needing to burn a CD/DVD (traditional methods!).
It can also load floppy/hard disk images, or kernel/initrds, or (some) ISO (CD image) files, for installing other distributions. UNetbootin has built-in support for a number of distributions, including Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE, PCLinuxOS, Linux Mint, ArchLinux, Debian, CentOS, Frugalware, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and Parted Magic.
Also, as an added bonus, it would download the ISO file for you from the official repositories if you do not have the ISO file with you. Although, you should not expect advanced features as found with a popular software utility – PowerISO. You can even have it on your Mac.
You can install it as a standalone application or you may opt for it to utilize as a command line tool.
Create Bootable USB Linux using UNetbootin
- Download UNetbootin and install it.
- Connect the Pendrive to a computer.
- Open the program and select your desired Linux distribution from the drop-down menu and select the version of Linux.
- Locate the ISO file on your hard drive on the computer and select it.
- Click ok to continue.
- After some time depending on your system speed UNetbootin will install the Linux distribution on your Pendrive.
Now, you’ve got a bootable Linux USB drive in your hand. You could use it for installing Linux on your computer faster than the traditional CD drive method. If you are interested, you could also check our article to disable automatic ubuntu updates.