Creating a bootable USB flash drive from an ISO file

If you want to test out new Linux distros or just install a new OS on another computer, you’ll often have to create a bootable USB drive with an ISO image of the system. In this article we’ll learn to write ISOs to USB drives using ddgui, a GUI frontend for dd.

Dependencies

ddgui depends on Rust and cargo. On an Arch based distribution (such as Manjaro, Arch Linux), you can install them using Pacman:

sudo pacman -S rust

This will install the rustc compiler and Cargo.

Installing

First, let’s clone the repository and go the ddgui directory:

git clone https://github.com/miguelnto/ddgui
cd ddgui

Now let’s compile and install the program:

sudo make install

Usage

Invoke the program from the command line as root:

sudo ddgui

When you open the program, you should see something like this:

Select the ISO and the device where you want to write the ISO, then click Start.

After the process is finished, if no error occurs, it will show “Process finished sucessfully” on the screen. The USB drive is now bootable and you can proceed booting into the system.

Happy hacking!

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