» Creating an Ubuntu LiveUSB from the ISO file in OS X
I’m going to install Ubuntu 9.10 in a couple of machines at home so I needed to create a LiveUSB for that since burning CDs is so old school and mostly wastes the disk. After doing a quick search for a graphic tool for that I ended up resorting to the good old Unix dd command for the task like this:
Click on the image for the full size view.
Steps go like this:
- Grab the desired ISO file from the Internet. Verifying integrity with MD5 is a good idea.
- Open a Terminal emulator window.
- Get the current list of devices by running “diskutil list”.
- Insert your USB key
- Determine the device node assigned to your USB drive by running “diskutil list” again (e.g. /dev/disk2)
- Run “diskutil unmountDisk /dev/diskN”. In my case the device was /dev/disk2.
- Use DD like this “dd if=/path/to/ubuntu-9.10-beta-desktop-i386.iso of=/dev/disk2 bs=1m
- Finally, eject the media by running “diskutil eject /dev/disk2″ and remove your USB drive when the command completes.
And that’s it. If you have been following this steps, you should have a bootable Live USB with Ubuntu by now.
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