I downloaded the new ISOs for desktop and netbook, as well as this nifty new tool for creating a USB flash bootable version out of it, all from Ubuntu’s site. I also had an older version of Unetbootin that I had found elsewhere on the internet from the last couple of Ubuntu releases.
The tool linked to from Ubuntu’s site is a Pendrive Linux utility: http://www.pendrivelinux.com/downloads/Universal-USB-Installer/Universal-USB-Installer.exe.
Both of these tools (Unetbootin and Pendrive Universal Installer) take a linux live iso (which you would typically burn onto a cd) and blow it onto a USB thumbdrive so that you can actually boot machines to Linux from the thumbdrive, leaving the underlying OS on the hard drive, XP or Win7 or whatever, completely alone.
But to get to the problem – neither of these tools worked with the Ubuntu 10.10 desktop iso. Well they worked, but the machine would not boot from the USB thumbdrive. Well it would boot but it would fail very early with an error message.
After some Googling around, I managed to track the problem down to the USB installer. I don’t know what has changed so significantly in 10.10, but neither of those utilities works right with it. Well actually one does, if you get the new version released since 10.10 was released, Unetbootin http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/. The newest version worked fine and solved all my problems.
However this is not an auspicious start (say compared to turning on the iPad for the first time).
