I saw Ivanka Majic, Ubuntu’s design team leader, retweet the following plight by fellow design team member Michael Forrest earlier and decided to also post it here. Judging by the sheer amount of OS X shareware crap and iPhone app press releases that crowd up my inbox on a daily basis I’m figuring someone somewhere out there who reads this blog may be able to help.
Michael Forrest’s application is a simple burning utility for OS X that lets you convert an Ubuntu ISO to a bootable USB memory stick.
I’ve shamelessly copy-and-pasted the following from his blog post appeal so if you can help, or know a Cocoa whizz who can, then please consider forwarding the following information: –
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
The project is on Launchpad here: https://code.launchpad.net/~michaelforrest/ubuntuusbcreator-osx/trunk