OS X Ubuntu USB Creator

Canonical

on 9 March 2010

Tags: Design , programming

I've spent some time attempting to make a Cocoa that lets you burn an Ubuntu ISO to a USB memory stick on OS X.

I think I've got as far as I'm gonna get with it now, sadly.


How far I got...

  • The UI is pretty concise
  • A USB stick gets detected when plugged in
  • The right signal is sent to the dd process and parses the progress for the progress bar
Major outstanding issues

  • It's really SLOW. I'm not familiar with how the dd command line utility works -- people keep talking about 'eraseblocks' and suchlike and my eyes glaze over..
  • It doesn't detect and inform the user when the write is complete
  • It doesn't seem to create a bootable device
  • I can't see how to automatically remount a device after I've unmounted it with diskutil
  • I'm not amazingly confident that once I've detected the device a volume resides on I'm not then going to end up destroying all the data on the wrong drive 

It would be pretty awesome if you were able to help out.  
source: mikebuntu.blogger.com


Talk to us today

Interested in running Ubuntu Desktop in your organisation?

Newsletter signup

Select topics you’re
interested in

In submitting this form, I confirm that I have read and agree to Canonical’s Privacy Notice and Privacy Policy.

Related posts

Design and Web team summary – 03 September 2019

This was a fairly busy two weeks for the Web & design team at Canonical.  Here are some of the highlights of our completed work. Web squad Web is the squad...

Design and Web team summary – 16 August 2019

This iteration was the Web & design team’s first iteration of the second half of our roadmap cycle, after returning from the mid-cycle roadmap sprint in...

Design and Web team summary – 2 August 2019

This iteration was fairly light iteration for the Web & design team at Canonical as we had a fair few people on holidays as well as a group who has gone to...