Ubuntu ISOs To Finally Double As USB Images

Well, it became about time!

Personally, I haven't been using my CD-ROM drives since I bought my new 'energy-efficient' mobo. Because the new mobo only came with two parallel-cable (PATA) slots, and those are reserved for harddrives.

I mean, why on earth would anybody need CD-ROMS if there are SD-cards and USB sticks? I did the same in my car, ditched the CD player and went for one of the first SD-card auto radios; about four years ago or so.

Gentoo wasn't a problem at all; they've always been providing USB bootable media as long as I ditched my optical drives. However, Fedora and Ubuntu really lived in the past, and it lead to lots of frustrations. Like "Ubuntu makes it easy to boot from USB by using USB-creator", yeah, nice if that USB-creator is only available for Ubuntu! It's also easy on Mac and Windows, but not on - say any other Linux distro than Ubuntu.

Nonetheless, what really struck me, was that Debian's believe that it ran from CD-ROM were pretty low level. So this stupid behaviour also ended up in Ubuntu: Even if I spent tons of effort to make it boot from USB, manually creating the ISO from the command line, halfway the installation it still stopped because the CD-ROM was not attached. So I had to loop mount the file system to a directory, and then use the /dev/loop0 or so device to configure it as 'my CD-ROM' drive. Really, how stupid is that? Makes me remember Windows. And then, Ubuntu didn't install GRUB to the harddisk - even though it installed all the rest of the operating system to the harddisk, nope, it wrote the boot record and GRUB... To the SD card. Yeah, way to go!!!

So I set out to install the Ubuntu USB-creator thingy on Gentoo, but not available. Now, if some commercial company only makes their software available for Mac, Windows and Ubuntu, I could live with it. But Ubuntu ignoring the users who use another distribution? Hmm, didn't expect that. However, probably they were not aiming at attracting 'current' Linux users who were on another distro. It seems they're more aiming at existing Windows and Mac OS users. Especially the first are probably more old fashioned, they really believe you can't live without CD-ROMs to boot stuff it seems.

So yeah, it became about freakin' time, I waited for years or so for this move. Finally! What took them so long?

Hmm, almost forgot: I shouldn't rant, I should be glad! Let's celebrate to the bleeding edge Fedora and Ubuntu finally catching up to the more 'conservative' distributions like Gentoo. And maybe the really stupid Debian-installation process which has CDROM-dependency almost hardcoded in, will finally catch up too!

Now, I can finally 'physically' ditch my CDROM-drive without losing the ability to install new distributions. At least I hope!