OS X Ubuntu USB Creator

Michael Forrest

Tue 09 Mar 2010

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

The project is on Launchpad here: https://code.launchpad.net/~michaelforrest/ubuntuusbcreator-osx/trunk

It would be pretty awesome if you were able to help out.