Creating Bootable USB Flash Drives with Popsicle and Impression

It’s been interesting to watch how the ways in which you could test drive a Linux distribution have evolved. It’s gone from needing to partition a hard drive (always fraught with some peril) to creating a live CD (not exactly sustainable), to using a virtual machine or a bootable USB flash drive.

For a long time, the latter has been my preferred way to give a distribution a try. Best of all, I can use the same drive over and over again.

But what to use to create a bootable flash drive? There are more than a couple of options out there. I turn to simple tools in that regard, two of which I look at in this post.

To use these applications, you’ll first need to download what’s called an ISO image. It’s a large file with the extension .iso, which you can get from the website of the Linux distribution that you want to try.

Popsicle

Developed by the folks at Linux-powered computer maker System 76, Popsicle is fast, simple, and effective.

Let’s say you’ve downloaded an ISO image. Insert a flash drive into a USB port on your computer and fire up Popsicle. You’ll see something like this:

Find the ISO image that you downloaded and then click Next. From there, choose one or more USB drives (Popsicle can write to several at once). Here’s what that looks like for one flash drive:

Click Next. Popsicle asks for the password that you use to log into your desktop. Enter that and then click Authenticate (or whatever label appears on the button in your Linux distribution).

Popsicle then writes the ISO image to the drive(s) that you chose.

Impression

Impression has a nifty feature that Popsicle lacks: it can download an ISO image for you. You’re not stuck with that; you can also grab an image off the web and use it.

To get going, pop a flash drive into your computer then fire up Impression. Here’s what that looks like:

From there, select a Linux distribution from the list or point Impression to an ISO you’ve downloaded. Impression can directly download ISO images for several popular Linux distributions including Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE, Manjaro, and Arch.

Once you’ve selected an ISO image, this screen displays:

Then, click Write. You’ll be asked if you want to erase the contents of the drive. Let’s assume that you are. So, click Erase.

If you opted to let Impression download an ISO image for you, that could take a while depending on the size of the distribution and on the speed of your internet connection.

Impression asks for the password you use to log into your desktop. Enter that, give Impression the go ahead, and before you know it you’ll have a bootable flash drive.

Summing Up

Popsicle and Impression aren’t the most feature-packed tools, but they don’t need to be. They get the job done quickly. And that’s what I look for in my software.

— Scott Nesbitt