OS X Ubuntu USB Creator

Canonical

on 9 March 2010

Tags: Design , programming

This article is more than 15 year s old.

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 in your organisation?

Newsletter signup

Get the latest Ubuntu news and updates in your inbox.

By submitting this form, I confirm that I have read and agree to Canonical's Privacy Policy.

Related posts

How we ran an effective sprint to refresh our website, Part 1

Part 1 of how we ran a design sprint to refresh our website. Sharing what worked, what didn’t, and lessons from designing for open source in mind.

A deep dive into our grid system and typography for the A4 format

We recently redesigned our whitepapers as part of our broader rebranding project. Let’s look at some of the ideas behind our approach to layout and...

An Introduction to Open Source Licensing for complete beginners

Open source is one of the most exciting, but often misunderstood, innovations of our modern world. I still remember the first time I installed linux on my...