The Universal Netboot lnstaller…UNetbootin
| January 4th, 2009- The Universal Netboot lnstaller…UNetbootin
Here’s a cool tool I found, by accident. It may be old to some of you, but I find it to be very useful. It allows me to make bootable USB sticks, very easily. Sourceforge Project Page Wikipedia Entry UNetbootin is an amazing tool, well written and multi-platform. I have used this tool to create several USB Bootable flash drives, and really enjoy it’s ease of use. There are several options for well known distributions, that will create a bootable USB flash disk, and download the latest iso image to build your flash distro. **You can also install your own distribution of choice, as seen in the screen shot below:
Options in the current version, are: Arch Linux, BackTrack, CentOS, CloneZilla, Damn Small Linux, Debian, Dream Linux, Elive, FaunOS, Fedora, FreeBSD, FreeDOS, FrugalWare, Gentoo, Gujin, Kubuntu, Linux Mint, Mandriva, NetBSD, NTPasswd, openSUSE, Ophcrack, Parted Magic, PCLinuxOS, Puppy Linux, Slax, SliTaz, Smart Boot Manager, Super Grub Disk, Ubuntu, Xubuntu, and Zenwalk.
If you don’t see your distro of choice, you can simply download the iso image, and select it from your hard drive. I used it to install SumoLinux from iso onto a 32GB usb stick recently, and it worked flawlessly. As I am writing this, I’m also installing SliTaz onto a 1MB USB stick, and including the download of the ISO, from start to finish, took only a few steps.
- Insert the target usb stick
- Launch UNetbootin
- Select the drive from the dropdown, (My only USB inserted was F:\, and was preselected)
- Select the distribution from the dropdown list
- Press “OK”
The Slitaz distro was 26Mb, so it took a minute or two to download, and then the build process begins:
Once downloaded, the process only takes about 60 seconds:
I am very happy to have found it, and wish to thank Geza Kovacs (tuxcantfly) [The Author of UNetbootin], and all those who helped. This is a great tool!
