Tuesday, November 7, 2017

Creating a bootable USB drive with multiple Linux distributions

Choosing the right Linux distribution for a task is critical, and having numerous distributions on one USB drive makes this easy. Here's how you can achieve this, with Multiboot USB.

 MultiBootUSB is a software installer which allows the user to install multiple Live Linux Distros to a single USB drive/Pendrive/Flash drive and able to boot from it.
USBs can be tested without reboot using the inbuilt QEMU. 


Installation

In order to install Multiboot USB, you first must download the installer that matches your platform.
 Sometimes you might need Kali Linux? Puppy Linux? Ubuntu? Debian? The list goes on and on. What if I told you that you didn't have to choose just one, that you could create a single USB drive that would boot into your Linux distribution of choice? That's right, it's not only possible, it's quite easy. With the help of Multiboot USB, you can create a flash drive with whatever live Linux distributions you need. This tool is cross platform (you can install it on Linux or Windows) and can easily create your personal multi-distribution USB drive.
I'm going to walk you through that very process, demonstrating on windows platform

 Once the main window opens, click on the Select USB disk drop-down and choose the flash drive to be used.



 With the correct drive selected, click on the Browse button and navigate to the first ISO image you want to install. Once you've added the first distribution, click the Install distro button and Multiboot USB will do it's thing. When prompted, click Yes to proceed as soon below.

 Depending upon the distribution you are installing, the process can take anywhere from a couple of minutes to 10 minutes. One thing I've noticed is that sometimes the percentage timeline instantly jumps to 99% and then sits there for a long while—apparently, this is normal. Wait until the installation completes (you will be prompted to click OK when the installation finishes) and then go through the process again to install another live distribution as soon below.


 When you have all of your distributions installed , you can close out Multiboot USB, unmount your flash drive, and remove the device. You can now insert your Multiboot-empowered USB drive into your PC of choice and boot into one of your added live distributions.

        FOR LINUX FLATFORM

Or if your are downloding from linux platform.Once you have it downloaded, open up a terminal and issue the following command (from within the directory housing the downloaded file):
sudo dpkg -i python3-multibootusb_XXX_all.deb
Where XXX is the release number.
Chances are, that installation will error out. To fix it, issue the command:
sudo apt install -f
That's all there is to the installation. You're ready to create your first multiboot flash drive

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