Fix for making bootable Ubuntu Live USB with persistence using Unetbootin on a Mac

[Quackers]

I may be wrong but I would be surprised if your iMac has a cd drive yet boots from a USB, unless you've altered the info.plist file.

On another tack I have just made an Ubuntu installation USB with a USB2 Sandisk cruzer blade 4GB and a 13-10 normal iso (i.e. not a mac version) and it boots fine through Unetbootin's menu when I select "try Ubuntu without installing". I used my guide from post 1 and it just works.

That's perhaps something you could try (a non-Mac version). I've now tried several USB's and a number of Mac and non-Mac Ubuntu versions and they've all booted fine on my rMBP (mid 2012).

So I'm at a loss to understand why yours does not work if your system can boot from a USB.
Do you have any other USB's with a bootable operating system on them that you could try to boot on your iMac?

[p2ranger]

I've tried lots of different combinations and I could never get the drive to show on reboot.

I installed the rEFInd thing and that showed the drive on reboot. It even showed the tux penguin. The only problem is that when I selected it for boot, it went into my windows bootcamp installation.

I'm at a loss as to what to do next.

Thanks

Jason

[Quackers]

I think refind can get mixed up and show the penguin for Windows by mistake. If that was the only other option showing in your boot menu then the USB was not appearing, again.
Have you ever booted anything by USB on this Mac?

[p2ranger]

Yes I have. I used something from this site: http://penguintosh.com/tag/linux-usb-creator/
I used that to put the iso on my USB drive. I was able to boot in to ubuntu, but the screen didn't look right. I think there was a display driver issue.

As to rEFInd mixing up the icon, I tried selecting the linux icon and the windows icon, and they both sent me to windows.

Jason

[Quackers]

So you've had Ubuntu Live desktop running twice. The first time you had 4 screens and the next time the display didn't look right.
I would suggest that you look into solving the display problems as your problem booting into Ubuntu seems to be gone.

[p2ranger]

Thanks for you help. I'm going to post this here as a reference in case someone else may need it.

The last post on this thread was an easy way to help me get to where I could boot to an Ubuntu desktop, but I have a display problem where it is showing four of them.

http://www.linux.org/threads/mac-linux-usb-loader.3579/

YMMV

Jason

[Quackers]

Post a question regarding your 4 desktops in General Help forum and see if anyone has seen it before.

[sally2]

Hi Quackers I don't know if you're still monitoring this thread but I've been trying to get this to work for the past few days on my MacBook Pro 10 retina using a 4gb usb and everything works BUT the persistence option. I am able to boot Ubuntu and use it without any problem but I can't get the files I create to stay on the USB. When I configure the persistence option on unetbootin I tried sizes from 256mb to 2048 mb but none of those seemed to work. I'm using syslinux 6.01 with the MBR partition. What's weird is that it seems like the persistence file is being created, because when I look at the USB using gparted after boot I see a difference in "free space" between when i allocated 2gb and 256mb persistence. But for some reason it just refuses to stay. If you happen to have any ideas that'd be great!

edit: there seems to be a bug with 12.04 onwards (even appearing in Trusty) that makes persistence not work on UEFI boots. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...2/+bug/1159016 , did you run into this?

[Quackers]

Hi sally2, yes I'm finding the same thing, sadly.
I made one a day or two ago and persistence does not work on that either. I can only assume that something has changed, as you say.
As I don't know what's actually changed I'm not knowledgable enough to do anything about it at the moment.

[Quackers]

Sally2 I've been playing and reading that bug report you linked to.

As a consequence (in OSX) I plugged in the Ubuntu USB and opened it (double-click). I navigated to Boot/Grub and right-clicked on grub.cfg choosing to open with Textedit.
Under the heading

menuentry "Try Ubuntu without installing" {

I then added "persistent" (no quotes) to the following line before quiet splash then saved the change.

linux	/casper/vmlinuz.efi  file=/cdrom/preseed/ubuntu.seed boot=casper persistent quiet splash --

When I boot holding the Alt key down (on my Mac) with the Ubuntu USB plugged in I get 2 USB icons in the menu.
The first is Windows (presumably because Apple can't conceive of anything else being booted) and the second is EFI Boot.
On booting the Windows one I set up my wireless connection and changed a couple of things and then rebooted in to the same icon (Windows).
The changes persisted, which is good.
I then rebooted using the EFI Boot option and the changes were still there That's also good.
So I think my edit to grub.cfg has worked. Have a try for yourself.