In order to test some stuff, I needed to install Xubuntu in one of the
hard drive partitions on a 5-6 year old generic tower machine.
I downloaded the Xubuntu 14.04.1 AMD64 ISO, which at 935MB no longer
fits on a single CD. So I burned a DVD+R. It failed to boot. The
drive in which I burned it is rather suspect, so I tossed the DVD and
changed tack: I've got a couple 4+ GB USB flash drives laying on my
desk, so I decided to try making a bootable USB flash drive.
Google pointed me to various sets of instructions which seemed to
either involve either
1) Mounting the ISO image, copying files around, downloading various
other bits, and just a lot of faffing around in general.
2) Installing something like unetbootin (which presumably automates
all the faffing) which then requires installing a bunch of other
stuff (including Qt).
But, I found one blog post which said that just using 'dd' to copy an
ISO image to the USB flash drive usually "just worked".
So I dd'ed the 935MB ISO image to the flash drive and plugged it into
the target machine, hit the reset button, hit F11 for the boot menu,
picked the USB flash drive from the list, and Bob's your uncle: it
booted and installed just fine.
What I'm wondering is why all the blog posts, wiki pages, and HOWTOs
showing either the complicated command-line procedures or
dependency-heavy "USB creator" apps? (Many of them quite recent.)
Did this work because the Xubuntu people do something special when
creating the ISO image? (If so, then they have my thanks!)
Is what I thought was a plain vanilla ASROCK/Nvidia AM2+ motherboard
BIOS something special? (It's an AMI BIOS dated 2009, so it's nothing
particularly recent.)
--
Grant Edwards grant.b.edwards Yow! Let me do my TRIBUTE
at to FISHNET STOCKINGS ...
gmail.com
