Sometimes your usb won’t boot, sometimes it will but with grub errors, sometimes it freezes before finishing writing the image, sometimes it exits with no error feedback… It’s bit of a mess! — If you want to write same ISO image to multiple USB drives, than it is a real pain.
Yes, it’s true that code savvy folks would simply write a little bash script to automate the process, but large number of users would only be comfortable with a GUI tool. This is where ‘Gnome MultiWriter’ stepped right in.The developer, Richard Hughes faced a similar issue when he was looking for a way to create a number of USB rives pre-loaded with an OS. An idea popped into his mind to create a tool which is simple enough, so that even his dad could use it.
He developed ‘Gnome MultiWriter’ as a solution, which can write an ISO/IMG image file to 20 USB drives simultaneously, each being between 1GB and 32GB in size.
This simple and minimalist tool nixes the need to customize or create a command line script and relinquishes the need to waste an afternoon performing an identical set of action. All you need is this app, an ISO, some thumb-rives and lots of empty USB ports.
Seems so exciting? Although the developer wanted this app to be simple enough so that it could fulfill requirements of common Linux users but it is still at beta stage (unstable to use) and thus simple repository installation is missing – there are no pre-built binaries to install or a PPA to add to your software sources.
If you know your way around the usual configure/make process you can get it up and running in no time. On Ubuntu 14.10 you may also need to install the following packages first:
sudo apt-get install gnome-common yelp-tools libcanberra-gtk3-dev libudisks2-dev gobject-introspection
If you get it up and running, give it a whirl and let us know what you think!
Bugs and pull requests can be longed on the GitHub page for the project, which is where you’ll also found tarball downloads for manual installation.
