USB+Thumb+Drive+Installation

Installing LinuxMCE from a USB Thumb Drive (USB Flash Drive/ USB Stick)

Background

This guide explains a method of creating a bootable USB thumb drive containing the LMCE installation media. The usual method of install is to download the DVD iso installer image and burn that to a DVD. However, in order to save DVDs and for cases here optical drives aren't available or desired, a flash drive or thumb drive is an excellent alternative.

I performed these steps on a Fedora Core 17 desktop machine but I'm sure a similar approach will work on other systems.

Steps

1. Download the snapshot or iso DVD image from the usual locations (http://linuxmce.iptp.org/snapshots/)

1. Download the MD5 checksum and confirm that your ISO file is error free (beyond the scope of this article).

1. Ensure you have unetbootin installed for your system (http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/)

1. For unetbootin to use your thumb drive, it needs to be formatted and have a FAT32 partition added to it, and then be mounted. Again, this is beyond the scope of this article but I formatted my thumb drive using the disks utility in KDE (chose compatible with all systems - MBR/DOS) and then used gparted to create a new FAT32 partition on the drive. Removing and adding the drive (and choosing "open in file manager") then causes it to be mounted by Fedora.

1. Run unetbootin as root (not sure if this is essential but I did)

1. 1. Choose "Diskimag" radio button (rather than Distribution
   2. Browse to your downloaded iso image and select it using the elipses button [...]
   3. Select your usb drive if it isn't already. In my case /dev/sdb1. Note, if there is nothing to select here you need to make sure your drive is in the state described in point 4 above before running unetbootin.
   4. Click OK, and that's it. When done, you should have a bootable LMCE installer on your drive.