Etcher is a free and open-source image burner with support for Windows, OS X, and GNU/Linux. It makes USB and SD card image burning as simple and fast as possible. Etcher was developed to fit a particular need, which is “an SD card burner app that is simple for end users, extensible for developers, and works on any platform”.
That is although the developers initially meant it to solve problems of writing ISOs to SD cards, in particular, they provided a one-stop universal and cross-platform solution for burning images to SD cards and USB drives safely and easily. You may download and install it from the Official Website Etcher Download.
Create a USB Installer On Any OS Using Etcher
Etcher is a free, open-source image writing tool.It is available for all major desktop operating systems: Windows, macOS and Linux. This makes it an ideal tool to recommend as the following steps will, more or less, be the same no-matter which operating system you are reading from!
- Download the latest Etcher release from etcher.net and install it (if required).
- If you’re using Ubuntu (or another Linux distribution) you do not need to install the app. Once you’ve given it the relevant permissions you can double-click on the AppImage to run it.
- Download the latest Ubuntu image from the Ubuntu website.
- Although this guide is written for Ubuntu 16.10 you can use any compatible .iso or .img file for any operating system, e.g., Android x86, Linux Mint, Fedora or Hannah Montana Linux (hey, it’s up to you).
- Attach a 2GB (or larger) flash drive to your computer
- Important: If you have any data on the flash drive be sure to back it up right now. Etcher will scrub the drive clean as part of the installer-making processor.
- Launch/run Etcher on your desktop and click on the “Select image” button.
- Click “Select Drive” and choose the your flash drive you connected earlier.
- Click “Flash image”
- Locate your Linux .iso installer file. If you downloaded this through a website (e.g., Ubuntu.com) then it should be located in your ~/Downloads folder.
- Etcher will automatically select an external drive with ample free space. If it doesn’t, click the ‘Connect a drive’ button to select a device.
If you have more than one external drive, SD card or USB stick attached make sure that you have selected the correct drive before proceeding.
That’s it! Etcher takes care of the rest of the process. It will inform you when it’s done and tell you whether it succeeded or encountered an error.
To use the installer on a computer just remove it from your current PC and insert it in to the one you wish to install Ubuntu on. Then, reboot the device, remembering to select the USB as the boot drive if it’s required (usually set via the BIOS).
