If you don’t happen to have the ISO of whichever distro you chose downloaded, you’ll be able to check a box that will automatically begin downloading it from a pre-defined server. It even supports creating a Windows Vista/7 bootable thumb drive, and somehow makes that possible with the same Linux-based syslinux/isolinux boot-loader!Īfter making your choice and then browsing to the CD image, you can choose the drive letter of the thumb drive you want to copy the files to, and then click “Create”. The drop-down list has many Linux-related entries, including Ubuntu and a mass of derivatives, Debian, Backtrack, Puppy, Arch, CentOS, Gentoo, GParted, Fedora, Jolicloud, Sabayon Linux, SLAX, PCLinuxOS, MEPIS, Ultimate Boot CD (the reason I discovered the tool) and so much more. It’s simple, but that’s all it needs to be. You simply run it, choose whichever options you need to, create the thumb drive, and then that’s it.

It looks like an installer, but that’s actually the entire application. One, it’s updated with new entries often, and two, it doesn’t need to be installed on your PC.

There are a couple of things that make this tool so great.

In particular, both Ubuntu and openSUSE require different steps, and it’s a pain for new and experienced users alike to have to read into the different schemes in order to pull off something that should be simple.Įven me, someone who doesn’t mind technical things, can get annoyed with all of the different schemes out there, so it’s with a huge sigh of relief that I discovered a tool called “Universal USB Installer”, a software tool from that makes it easy for anyone to create a bootable Linux thumb drive – as long as you’re running Windows. But, what about those who either don’t have blank CDs lying around, or don’t have an optical drive installed in their PC?Īlthough it’d be nice, not all distros copy over to a thumb drive quite the same way, so while you may master one, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be fine with another. A great thing for Linux is that its popularity is rapidly growing, and thanks to the countless number of “Live CDs” out there, anyone can download and burn an image to allow them to test drive a distro with no risk to their PC.

Universal usb installer