USB demo/installer

Getting Technical

rEFInd

This very flexible product has three prerequisites:

• computer having modern, UEFI, firmware
• user having modicum of command line skill
• USB flash media, of at least 8 GB (USB3 preferred)

The product is available from: USB-image

• (caution) insert USB media and run "lsblk" to ascertain it's drive letter - sd(x)
  • getting this wrong can result in the existing OS being overwritten
• (advisable) clear the USB drive - "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sd<your drive USB letter> bs=1M count=8"
• unzip <refind...zip> | dd of=/dev/sd<your drive letter> bs=4M
  • test boot this on any UEFI computer
    • it should display pretty icons - including one for "shutdown"
    • if not, have you disabled "CSM" & "secure-boot", in UEFI ? (essential)
• return the USB device to a booted Linux computer
• use GParted (preferably) to create additional partitions, one for each distribution ISO
  • oversize each partition a little, to allow for later releases being larger
  • format each partition to (preferably) "unformatted"
  • give each partition both "label" and "name" relevant to the distro ISO to be installed there
• copy one disto ISO to its relevant partition:
• "dd if=<required-distro.iso> of=/dev/sd<your drive USB letter><partition-number> bs=4M"
  • test boot this on any UEFI computer
• copy additional ISO, to separate partitions