DataLinkControl

The now quite popular netbook class of laptops are wonderful machines. Small, light, powerful enough and inexpensive. One thing that you give up though is a ROM drive of any kind, though often a SD card reader is built-in. I wanted to install the latest beta of Ubuntu (9.04) on an HP 2133 mini-note. Without the benefit of having a USB ROM drive, I went looking for how to get the installation .iso transferred to an SD card and make it bootable. I found many tutorials on how to use syslinux and hand put together what I needed, but they all required a working Linux install or at least getting Cygwin running on Windows. The HP was currently running a beta of Windows 7 (and quite nicely I might add), the various methods looked tedious and I was not really feeling like going through all of that. Surely there had to be an easier way...and of course there is. Over at FedoraHosted there is the liveusb-creator utility. A small GUI application that will create bootable media from .iso files. You simply have to point it to an .iso & a removable drive and it will do the rest. It even contains a drop down list of Fedora versions that it will automatically download. I downloaded the latest beta .iso of Ubuntu Jaunty, popped in a 2GB SD card and about 20 minutes later had the desired bootable SD. Rebooted, selected the card reader as the boot device and my install ran flawlessly.