OS X Ubuntu USB Creator

Canonical

on 9 March 2010

Tags: Design , programming

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

Template: Streamlining open source design contributions

As designers working at Canonical, we’re always thinking about open source. We believe that encouraging more designers to contribute to open source  benefits...

Decoding design: How design and engineering thrive together in open source

Open source thrives on engineering-driven processes. Fast feedback loops, terminal tools, Git workflows: they’re the lifeblood of how we build software in the...

Why web engineering is great

Hi, I’m Johann! I’m an engineering manager in Canonical’s web team. For the larger part of my 15 years of work experience as engineer, I’ve been working in...