My New Best Friend: Unetbootin

I install lots of distros. Several each week. I am a self-confessed distro junky. I have a collection of ISOs that go back many years. In fact I have boxes of spools of full CDs and DVDs. Aside from the space and environmental concerns, it is an expensive and time consuming obsession. Now, I have a solution. Better late than never as they say.

My solution is a utility called Unetbootin. It allows me to copy an ISO to a usb key in less than five minutes. The usb key is bootable in the same way that a live CD or DVD would be. This is a considerable saving in time and effort. This is much quicker than I could burn a CD. I can save the files as ISOs and use them as needed on a re-usable usb key. I have a couple dedicated for this purpose.

Unetbootin works this way. You download the latest version from sourceforge from the above link. It comes in either a Windows or Linux format. I use the Linux file. The first thing to do with the download binary is to right-click on it and make it executable. I use Ubuntu, so this is how to do it in Gnome. Right click and choose Properties. Then click on the Permissions tab and put an X in the Execute box where it says “Allow executing file as a program”. Close the window and click (my setup) or double click (Ubuntu default) on the file. Screenshots are provided at Sourceforge so I won’t bother with putting them here.

You will need to use your password to open the binary executable. Once it is open you will have to choose the distribution and version, locate the ISO file that you wish to use and then choose the device where it will be installed. It is all in boxes and dead simple to use. Click OK to start it making the usb ready to use the ISO.

Once you have started it will take a couple of minutes. When it finishes it will offer to Reboot or Exit. Choose Exit, unless you want to reboot your computer right away.

That’s as hard as it gets.

Now, I don’t have wallets of bootable CDs that take up space, are hard to find, that can get scratched and become outdated. Instead I have lots of ISOs and one tiny file in my home folder called unetbootin. I even made a launcher for it on my desktop to make it easier to use.

If I want to try out a new distro, I use the launcher and have the usb ready to use in a couple of minutes. It might take longer than hunting through my CD wallets, but it could just as easily take less time.

Now instead of burning my ISOs individually to disk, I save them in a folder on a hard drive. When the drive fills up, I may archive them to DVD or perhaps just dispose of them. I have not got to that point yet. I am too busy having fun installing and running Live distros. Unetbootin supports lots of distros. There may be a few obsure ones that won’t work, but I haven’t found them yet.

Unetbootin is the best utilty I have seen for installing Linux or trying Live CDs in a long time. If your computer can’t boot from usb, you can’t use this method, but most newer computers are capable of booting from usb. I don’t plan to go back to buring ISOS unless I need to do it and even then I will use rewritables. I have only to decide what to do with all of my old full CDs and DVDs. Anyone want a disk of Mandrake 7.0, if I can even find it?