Why isn't Ubuntu delivering USB images instead of ISO ones?

Solution 1:

The current iso image is ddable and the images have been ddable for quite some time now as far as I know.

sudo dd if=./ubuntu.iso of=/dev/sdx bs=16M

Where ./ubuntu.iso is the path to the actual file and /dev/sdx is the target USB drive.

Alternatively, you can use cat instead of dd which is arguably faster like so:

sudo -i
cat ./ubuntu.iso > /dev/sdx
exit

Again, ./ubuntu.iso represents the full path to the actual iso file and /dev/sdx is the actual USB device.

Even if the image were not ddable, it would simply take a couple of syslinux commands to convert the image to ddable form.

Hypothetically, if the Ubuntu iso images were not ddable, you would just have to run the following commands:

sudo apt-get install syslinux syslinux-utils
isohybrid ./ubuntu.iso --entry 4 --type 0x1c
dd if=./ubuntu.iso of=/dev/sdx bs=16M

Again, where ./ubuntu.iso is the path to the actual iso file and /dev/sdx is the actual USB device.

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