Ubuntu Live USB

Flashing USB Stick

Here's the deal.

First you download the ubuntu desktop edition installer. This is about 996 MB, just short of the 1 GB limit, so you can repurpose all those old thumbdrives that are too small for other distros.

The file you downloaded is an image file. Now you'll flash your USB drive with that image. It will create a boot partition, and a Linux partition, and then you'll be able to boot from the USB drive. (Presuming your operating system knows how to do so.)

Step 0: Insert USB Stick

Yup. Just stick it in there.

Step 1: Find the USB Stick

On some operating systems the USB drive will pop up as an icon on the desktop or in the folder viewer. Otherwise use parted:

$ parted -l 

Model: ATA Hitachi HTS54502 (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 250GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: gpt

Number  Start   End    Size    File system     Name                  Flags
 1      20.5kB  210MB  210MB   fat32           EFI System Partition  boot
 2      210MB   150GB  150GB   hfs+            Cronus
 3      150GB   151GB  650MB   hfs+            Recovery HD
 5      151GB   151GB  1049kB                                        bios_grub
 6      151GB   246GB  95.1GB  ext4
 4      246GB   250GB  4063MB  linux-swap(v1)


Model: PNY USB 2.0 FD (scsi)
Disk /dev/sdc: 2064MB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos

Number  Start   End     Size    Type     File system  Flags
 1      16.4kB  2064MB  2064MB  primary  fat16        lba

Okay, so our 2 GB flash drive is at /dev/sdc.

On the Mac, use Disk Utility from the command line:

$ diskutil list
/dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *250.1 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS MAC                     99.5 GB    disk0s2
   3:                  Apple_HFS Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk0s3
   4:                  Apple_HFS noospace                149.6 GB   disk0s4
/dev/disk2
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:     FDisk_partition_scheme                        *15.5 GB    disk2
   1:             Windows_FAT_32 NO NAME                 15.5 GB    disk2s1

the 16 GB flash drive is at /dev/disk2.

Step 2: Format the USB Stick

Now we format the drive (BE CAREFUL WITH dd):

$ dd bs=1M if=ubuntu-14.04.2-desktop-amd64.iso of=/dev/sdc

or, on the Mac,

$ dd bs=1m if=ubuntu-14.04.2-desktop-amd64.iso of=/dev/disk2

Note that this is slightly different notation from doing this same operation on the Mac, because on the Mac it uses BSD dd, while on Linux it's GNU dd. They take 1m and 1M as arguments, respectively.