Ubuntu's Live USB Disk Creator

Written by Michael Larabel in Software on 24 October 2008 at 12:02 PM EDT. Page 2 of 2. 25 Comments.

The Ubuntu USB creator program will show USB disks that have been mounted. Shown are the device, label, capacity, and free space. If there is enough free space available, the disk can be created to install the ISO image to. Lastly, there is the option to reserve additional space so that when booting the Ubuntu USB disk you can archive files such as documents and settings -- essentially making it a persistent OS environment. The amount of space to allocate for this extra storage can be allocated or this feature can be disabled.

Following these options, usb-creator will go ahead and make the bootable USB images of Ubuntu. This process may take several minutes depending upon the speed of the USB disk and other factors. If you are looking for a USB 2.0 flash drive to use for this purpose, we would recommend checking out the Corsair Flash Voyager or OCZ Rally series. Additionally, your motherboard must support booting from USB devices in order to use this Live USB functionality.

We have tried out usb-creator in the Ubuntu 8.10 Release Candidate and it had in fact worked as expected. The Ubuntu USB creator should be especially handy for those with netbooks (such as the ASUS Eee PC) where there is no CD/DVD drive. There are not yet any advanced customization features for usb-creator but it's a nice start by Canonical. This also isn't the first USB image creator. The UNetbootin project provides a utility that can create Live USB disks and supports a variety of different operating systems. You can check out usb-creator starting with Ubuntu 8.10, which will be officially released on the 30th of October.

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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.