Help Bring Ubuntu .ISO to USB Burning to OS X

By , Published March 9, 2010

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

Article originally appeared on omgubuntu.co.uk

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  • tjod

    Hello,

    Sorry to be ‘nitpicky’, but..
    cocoa is not an programming language, it’s rather an API (one of many for Mac OS). Cocoa applications are typically written in the “Objective C” language.

    • Chris

      Or, Cocoa is to OS X as gtk is to Ubuntu.

  • tjod

    Hello,

    Sorry to be ‘nitpicky’, but..
    cocoa is not an programming language, it’s rather an API (one of many for Mac OS). Cocoa applications are typically written in the “Objective C” language.

  • MLC

    Yeah, Objective C is… not bad, but leaves something to be desired. Then again, what programming language couldn’t use a little improvement?

    I know you need to create a syslinux subsystem to refer to the ISO’s files if it’s going to be on a USB. This ISO may do it by default. Hm, but if you need to work around the issues of dd, it may be beneficial to look at other similar tools like UNetbootin to see how they do it, or the libraries behind their USB stuffs.

    Also, you could put your efforts into porting Unetbootin natively to OS X. And, in that case, redesigning their website as well. XD But don’t listen to me, I’m not really into libraries and hardware when it comes to programming, so I would need to investigate a bit further.

  • MLC

    Yeah, Objective C is… not bad, but leaves something to be desired. Then again, what programming language couldn’t use a little improvement?

    I know you need to create a syslinux subsystem to refer to the ISO’s files if it’s going to be on a USB. This ISO may do it by default. Hm, but if you need to work around the issues of dd, it may be beneficial to look at other similar tools like UNetbootin to see how they do it, or the libraries behind their USB stuffs.

    Also, you could put your efforts into porting Unetbootin natively to OS X. And, in that case, redesigning their website as well. XD But don’t listen to me, I’m not really into libraries and hardware when it comes to programming, so I would need to investigate a bit further.

  • Anonymous

    all you really need is dd if=iso of=/dev/sXXX or just use this multibooter http://psychoticspoon.blogspot.com/2009/01/booting-multiple-livecds-from-single.html
    pretty simple from then on to write isos to a partition on the usb..