Simple ISO images

So here I am, busy installing a new version of Linux Mint on Hal, my Linux Box.

To do this, I want to

• Use GParted to reformat Hal's main disk, partitioning it the way I'd like it to be, and
• Install Linux Mint from an ISO image.

In the old days this meant burning the ISO images for both GParted and Linux Mint to CDs or DVDs, as appropriate, and booting from the DVD drive. Now days we'd kind of like to have the images on a bootable USB drive. Especially GParted, which is useful for disk manipulation on any machine.

In general a big pain, as you have to remember the intricacies of the dd command.

When I was preparing for the update, listed all of the packages I'd installed using LMDE, my old Linux version. In there, I found something called mintstick, which is billed as Tool to write .img and .iso files to USB sticks. Can also format them.

And it works. Here's what you do

1. Download your ISO image
2. Insert your USB Stick
3. Launch mintstick from a terminal window, using the command
   $ mintstick -m iso
4. A window will pop up that looks something like this:
   
5. On the left, use the dropdown menu to find your ISO image
6. On the right, find the USB drive. (Make sure you get the right one.) You'll get something that looks like this:
   
7. Click the Write button once it's highlighted.
8. Wait for completion.
9. Remove USB drive, and test on your target machine.

Supremely easy.

If you launch mintstick without the -m option you'll see it can do formatting, too, but I haven't looked into that. If you figure it out, leave a comment