On Ubuntu
-
Download the Ubuntu image for your device in your `Downloads` folder
-
Insert your SD card or USB flash drive
-
Identify its address by opening the "Disks" application and look for the "Device" line. If the line is in the
/dev/mmcblk0p1
format, then your drive address is:/dev/mmcblk0
. If it is in the/dev/sdb1
format, then the address is/dev/sdb
-
Unmount it by right-clicking its icon in the launcher bar, the eject icon in a file manager or the square icon in the "Disks" application
-
Open a terminal (
Ctrl+Alt+T
) to copy the image to your removable drive -
If the Ubuntu image file you have downloaded ends with an `.xz` file extension, run:
xzcat ~/Downloads/<image-file.xz> | sudo dd of=<drive address> bs=32M
-
Else, run:
sudo dd if=~/Downloads/<image-file> of=<drive address> bs=32M
-
Then, run the
sync
command to finalize the process -
You can now eject your removable drive. You are ready to install Ubuntu on your device ›
On Windows
-
Download the Ubuntu image for your device in your `Downloads` folder
-
If the Ubuntu image file you have downloaded ends with an .xz file extension, you will need to extract it first. To do so, you might have to install an archive extractor software, like 7-zip
-
Insert your SD card or USB flash drive
-
Download and install Win32DiskImager, then launch it
-
Find out where your removable drive is mounted by opening a File Explorer window to check which mount point the drive is listed under.
Here is an example of an SD card listed under E:
-
In order to flash your card with the Ubuntu image, Win32DiskImager will need 2 elements:
- an Image File: navigate to your
Downloads
folder and select the image you have just extracted -
a Device: the location of your SD card. Select the drive on which your SD card is mounted
- an Image File: navigate to your
-
When ready click on Write and wait for the process to complete.
-
You can now eject your removable drive. You are ready to install Ubuntu on your device ›
On macOS
-
Download the Ubuntu image for your device in your Downloads folder
-
Insert your SD card or USB flash drive
-
Open a terminal window (Go to Application » Utilities, you will find the Terminal app there), then run this command:
diskutil list
-
In the results, identify your removable drive device address, it will probably look like an entry like the ones below:
/dev/disk0 #: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER 0: GUID_partition_scheme *500.3 GB disk0 /dev/disk2 #: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER 0: Apple_HFS Macintosh HD *428.8 GB disk1 Logical Volume on disk0s2 E2E7C215-99E4-486D-B3CC-DAB8DF9E9C67 Unlocked Encrypted /dev/disk3 #: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER 0: FDisk_partition_scheme *7.9 GB disk3 1: DOS_FAT_32 NO NAME 7.9 GB disk3s1
Your removable drive must be
DOS_FAT_32
formatted. In this example,/dev/disk3
is the drive address of an 8GB SD card. -
Unmount your SD card with this command:
diskutil unmountDisk <drive address>
-
When successful, you should see a message similar to this:
Unmount of all volumes on <drive address> was successful
-
You can now copy the image to the SD card:
sudo sh -c 'gunzip -c ~/Downloads/<image file> | sudo dd of=<drive address> bs=32m'
When finished you will see this message:
3719+1 records in 3719+1 records out 3899999744 bytes transferred in 642.512167 secs (6069924 bytes/sec)
-
You can now eject your removable drive. You are ready to install Ubuntu on your device ›