A massive amount of operating systems have sprung forth from Debian, so it's another one that's worth looking into. It has a large number of tools pre-installed, but you'll find the rest very easy to install through the Ubuntu Software Center, a sort of App Store featuring thousands of compatible softwares.ĭebian includes a massive amount of packages that come with it (20,000 pre-compiled pieces of software). It has a large amount of compatible software and a sleek, modern looking interface. This is the Linux flavor that I mostly use and am familiar with. The official webpage for this project can be found here. It works right out of the box with many features pre-installed, so there is little setup necessary. It features a clean desktop, and is designed to be a more compatible version of Ubuntu. This is one I've wanted to try for a while, so it's one of the systems you'll see me add. I grabbed the list of 3 of the some of the most popular Linux flavors, as determined by DistroWatch. If you have one, skip this step (or don't, whatever). So, in order to run an operating system, we need to know which one to use. The photo above is the logos of the three most popular Linux distributions available: Linux Mint, Ubuntu, and Debian. Their official webpage can be found here. Quick and easy, it has a lot of great resources, like a list of their supported linux distros (although I have a list later for those searching), and a lot of other great features. It was recommended by rowilsonh, and seems to be a very efficient and easy to use alternative to the software I've listed.

This is another great tool worth considering. I have tested it on Windows and found it to work well. However, the Linux version doesn't seem to work on my Ubuntu (a type of Linux) laptop, so it doesn't seem to work for Linux. This one has a lot of the same features UNetBootin has, but it allows you to have more than one OS on a flash drive, which I really like. Works on: Windows, claims to work on Linux but I can't get it to work. YUMI (Your Universal Multiboot Installer) The Sourceforge page for this project can be found here. However, it is a much larger and better developed tool, and is actually a default program on some Linux flavors.

It is simple and easy to use, and allows you to download from a drop-down list rather than browsing and downloading the software online (although you can do this as well, if you want). These are both Open Source tools that will allow for the extraction of the data onto the USB drive. You've got a bunch of options out there- here are my favorites based on the ones I've tried.

We will need some software to actually extract the operating system onto the flash drive. Above you can see the logo for UNetBootIn.

Create live usb ubuntu for mac