@blog

I haven’t played around with recently released Ubuntu 10.04 LTS for two reasons: one, I’ve just been too busy with the iPad, and two, it was such a royal pain getting the Ubuntu installer ISO images to a USB flash drive to install on my netbook. The Ubuntu site directs you to use USB-Creator.exe, included on the Ubuntu ISO, to create the USB installer. Of course, this only runs under Windows.

Second option is to use UNetBootIn (Windows/Linux), which doesn’t help me us Mac users. In the past I’d booted to Windows on my Macbook Pro to image the USB installer, but I no longer see any good reason to maintain a Boot Camp partition.

Then I came across the following instructions online, which worked. I was kicking myself afterward, as OS X has had the capability to create a USB installer from any disk image, all along, using the diskutil and dd commands in Terminal. Why did this never occur to me before? Hope this helps you, too.

1. Download the desired .img file
2. Open a Terminal (under Utilities)
3.Run diskutil list to get the current list of devices
4. Insert your flash media
5.Run diskutil list again and determine the device node assigned to your flash media (e.g. /dev/disk2)
6.Run diskutil unmountDisk /dev/diskN
7.Execute sudo dd if=/path/to/downloaded.img of=/dev/diskN bs=1m
8.Run diskutil eject /dev/diskN and remove your flash media when the command completes

(via http://www.webupd8.org/2009/04/4-ways-to-create-bootable-live-usb.html)