Linux bootable USB Drives

I have a problem, I am not the proper combination of crazy/sexy/cool
to get the common tools for making bootable USB drives to work. I can
get uNetBootin ( http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net ) to work from
Windows, but not from Linux. As I have ditched Windows, having to use
windows to get the latest Linux distro CD image to boot from a USB
drive is... dumb.

I tried a bunch of tools and only succeeded in pulling out my
remaining hair. Then I found this article:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/FromUSBStick and way,
way, way at the bottom of the article it has "Create Bootable USB
Manually". The manual process looks complex with extracting files
from the ISO and other business. As soon as I was happily taking
notes on how to follow this procedure I got to the part titled
"Simpler way using the ISO file"...

OMG! You can boot right from the ISO file itself?

So here is the process to create a bootable USB drive for a Linux LiveCD:

1. Download a LiveCD iso file. I chose Mint Linux 12 (it is my
favorite distro so far).
2. Download and extract Grub4Dos (
http://download.gna.org/grub4dos/grub4dos-0.4.4-2009-06-20.zip ).
3. Grab a junky USB drive with ~1 GB capacity and format it with FAT.
Pay attention to the device node of the USB drive.
4. Drop to a terminal window and run the following from the Grub4Dos folder:
#bootlace.com /dev/sdb (if your USB drive is at /dev/sdb!)
5. Copy grldr from the Grub4Dos folder to the USB drive.
6. Copy the LiveCD iso file to the USB drive. Pay attention to the
name of the ISO file.
7. Create a "menu.lst" file on the USB drive
The menu.lst file should look like this:

title Mint12 x64
find --set-root /mint.iso
map /mint.iso (0xff)
map --hook
root (0xff)
kernel /casper/vmlinuz file=/cdrom/preseed/mint.seed boot=casper iso-scan/filename=/mint.iso splash quiet --
initrd /casper/initrd.lz

(it is one line starting "kernel" and the new line starts with "initrd")

8. You might need to change the Title to match your distro
(optional), replace "mint.iso" with the file name of your LiveCD iso,
and open the ISO to check for the name of the /preseed/.seed file
(ubuntu was "ubuntu.seed" and mint was "mint.seed").

Your mileage may vary, but I was able to use this to install Mint 12
on my laptop. When a new version comes out and I want to have a USB
drive that can be used to install it, all I have to do is replace the
"mint.iso" file with the new iso and I am all set.

This is the easiest way to get a bootable USB drive with a ISO... even
easier than actually using uNetBootin!

I am sorry Fire Fox, but I did try.

So I re-installed my computer over a week ago. I had been running
Ubuntu for a month and then thanks to the frustrations with Ubuntu
11.10 I went to Mint Linux (yeah, I used Linux full time for a month
and became a distribution snob in that amount of time.) The install
of Mint 12 went well and I really liked the layout and features (too
bad I really liked Ubuntu 11.04 more but I guess there is no going
back there).

Mint 12 claims support comes from, in part, the use of "Go Duck Go" (
http://duckduckgo.com/ ) as the search engine. I figured that while I
was trying Mint 12 that I would go all the way and avoid Google Chrome
and Google.com. It was very hard to break the habit. I almost fell
off the wagon several times the first day. After a few days I started
to work things out and enjoy the Google-free experience.

I don't like the idea that my web searches provide me results that are
based upon my geographic location and how often I visit specific
sites. Google tunes itself to provide results that are slanted toward
what it determines is your tastes. If you visit Fox news often and
perform a search, the results might be more along conservative lines.
If you visit Mother Jones and Huffington Post then the search results
might be more liberal. I consider myself very independent politically
and I don't like Google acting as a proxy to censor and spin the
world's news by various political groups. Sometimes I want to know
what Glenn Beck has to say and other times I want to know what John
Stewart has to say. I don't need Google deciding if I am 49% liberal
that day.

So, Go Duck Go is good, it is like google circa 2006 or so. You
search and you can guess that a similar search performed by another
person will yield similar results. So I used Go Duck Go a lot. The
problem is that I have become a Google power user.

I love to search from the browser bar. Firefox has mixed results with
that. I search images and videos and Go Duck Go has mixed results
with that. When I start up my browser and it just sits there waiting
for me to type the URL for where I want to go, I hate it. I have
become used to the Google "Most Visited Places" page. I just was
uncomfortable in FireFox, like a pair of pants or a sweater that were
just too tight in the wrong places. Today I gave it up and went back
to Chrome.

I want FireFox to be a success. I don't think Google dominance over
the web and phones is any better than a Microsoft Dominance (or Apple
dominance). I wanted to say that I switched back from Google to
FireFox just like I left Windows, but while I could leave Windows and
not look back (I love Gimp, Libre Office, Blender and have already
ditched NetFlix) -- I could not leave Google.

Thanks for nothing Adobe.

So Adobe is offering Flex to become open source (
http://developers.slashdot.org/story/11/11/15/1538209/adobe-to-donate-flex-sdk-to-open-source-community
) when they themselves admit that HTML5 is a better option.  So, Adobe
is basically abandoning Flash just after they added a 3d graphics game
engine and a bunch of zero-day vulnerabilities.  In looking back, the
lack of Flash was supposed to be a bad thing about the iPhone/iPad and
that Apple was wrong to think that Flash was unstable and bloated.
Then more features were added to Flash and it became unstable and
bloated on Android and Blackberry platforms.  More recently Adobe
killed Flash Lite so there would be no expectation to see Flash on
lower end devices, now Adobe is killing Flex.

I loved Flash.  I should preface that, I loved Flash the application
and not the plug-in.  I loved making cartoons and drawing with it, the
vectors in Flash were better than in Adobe Illustrator and the fact
you could animate and program with it sent me over the moon.  As I
became a web application developer, I saw the programmer oriented
nature of Flex to be very exciting.  With a MXML file I could write an
application that compiled into a SWF and could be used right away.
Flex was very exciting for programmers to make web applications that
didn't look like a programmer made it.

Then the dark days came.  Adobe bought Macromedia and didn't invest in
Apple, almost expecting Apple to roll over and die.  That was a bad
bet to make as the iPhone was about to become the most powerful
web-enabled tool ever.  Since Flash didn't run well on any Apple
device, ever, Steve Jobs hated Flash -- and now by proxy Adobe.  As
web pages worked to become more iPhone friendly the first thing to go
was Flash content, and in it's place HTML5 content supported by Webkit
in the Safari web browser.  As people invested in HTML 5 and fled the
old, old days of mandated IE 6 support, they realized HTML 5 was easy
and cool.  Suddenly it came to be understood that many of us were
using Flash to bring modern content and designs to IE 6 and now that
IE 6 was not the compatibility goal we became free to the new
possibilities of HTML 5.

Adobe dug in their heels and insisted the whole "HTML 5" thing was a
fad and that Flash was here to stay.  They pushed Android to use
Flash, they touted Blackberry Playbook's ability to run Flash...
(yuck)... in the end they are betting on a dead horse.  Flash will all
die and go away.  It will become irrelevant but not because better
solutions came along but because Adobe was dumb and tried to bring a
knife to a gun fight.  Had Adobe immediately re-tooled Flash to
compete and be compatible with HTML 5 and the associated technologies,
had Adobe taken Apple's distaste for Flash seriously, had Adobe
believed that if Steve Jobs says something is buggy, bloated, slow and
unstable -- it was... Had Adobe done anything different then we'd be
talking about how cool it is to run flash applications on Android,
iOS, Wii, XBox and everything else.

Instead we are talking about a half-hearted attempt to revive a
technology that held so much promise had it not been under Adobe's
control.  Open Sourcing Flex will not do anything.  Adobe had proven
their hate for Open Source when they killed off Air for Linux (another
promising technology for rich desktop applications developed in
Flash).  The Adobe Flash builder (formerly Adobe Flex Builder) remains
closed source and overpriced as a plug-in to Eclipse (they charge
money for an Eclipse plug-in!!).  Adobe turns to Open Source like a
guy asking a girl out on the night of the prom, it is just insulting
that Open Source would be their last choice when they have done little
to nothing for the movement in the past.  If they were serous about
Flash, they would Open Source the Flash Plug-in and then maybe get
back some stability.  Saying that Adobe is committed to Open Source by
giving away a mechanism to compile Open Code into closed (and buggy,
unstable, bloated, insecure...) plug-in bytecode is not helping
anyone.