OS X Ubuntu USB Creator

Canonical

on 9 March 2010

Tags: Design , programming

This article is more than 15 years 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

Design and Documentation clinics at FOSDEM Fringe 2026

FOSDEM is one of the biggest and most exciting open source events of the year, held at the Solbosch campus of the Université Libre de Bruxelles (Brussels),...

Open design: the opportunity design students didn’t know they were missing

What if you could work on real-world projects, shape cutting-edge technology, collaborate with developers across the world, make a meaningful impact with your...

Generating accessible color palettes for design systems … inspired by APCA!

This is the first of two blog posts about how we created the color palette for a new design system at Canonical. In this post I share my journey into...