UNetbootin takes care of all your USB Linux installtion blues….

I’d covered Fedora’s Live USB creator a while back. But for those of you wanting to install other flavours of linux on a USB stick (or a HD even), the process was lengthy and cumbersome. That was before UNetbootin, the Universal Netboot Installer. You see UNetbootin can be run from Linux or Windows and will enable you to install a fully functional linux distro to a USB stick or even a spare partition.

The current version has built-in support for the following distributions:

• Ubuntu (and official derivatives)
  • 6.06 LTS
  • 6.10
  • 7.04
  • 7.10
  • 8.04 LTS
• Debian
  • Stable/Etch
  • Testing/Lenny
  • Unstable/Sid
• Linux Mint
  • 3.1
  • 4.0
  • 5-r1
• openSUSE
  • 10.2
  • 10.3
  • 11.0
  • Factory
• Arch Linux
  • 2007.08
• Damn Small Linux
  • 4.4
• SliTaz
  • Stable
  • Cooking
• Puppy Linux
  • 4.00
• FreeBSD
  • 6.3
  • 7.0
• NetBSD
  • 4.0
• Fedora
  • 7
  • 8
  • 9
  • Rawhide
• PCLinuxOS
  • 2007
  • 2008
• Gentoo
  • 2007.0
  • 2008.0
• Zenwalk
  • 5.2
• Slax
  • 6
• Dreamlinux
  • 3.2
• Elive
  • Development
• CentOS
  • 4
  • 5
• Mandriva
  • 2007.1
  • 2008.0
  • 2008.1
• FaunOS
  • 0.5.4
• Frugalware Linux
  • Stable
  • Testing
  • Current

So go ahead and try some of those acquired flavors of Linux, or that FreeBSD you always wanted to install, but were too scared to. After all it’s only a USB stick, if it screws up just format and reinstall in 5-10 minutes using UNetbootin again.

UNetbootin can also be used to load various system utilities, including:

• Parted Magic, a partition manager that can resize, repair, backup, and restore partitions.
• Super Grub Disk, a boot utility that can restore and repair overwritten and misconfigured GRUB installs or directly boot various operating systems
• Backtrack, a utility used for network analysis and penetration testing.
• Ophcrack, a utility which can recover Windows passwords.
• NTPasswd, a utility which can reset Windows passwords and edit the registry.
• Gujin, a graphical bootloader that can also be used to boot various operating systems and media.
• Smart Boot Manager (SBM), which can boot off CD-ROM and floppy drives on computers with a faulty BIOS.
• FreeDOS, which can run BIOS flash and other legacy DOS utilities.

So have fun and happy installing…..