The MeeGo live image is designed to be used with a USB drive. A netbook or PC can be booted from the USB drive without modifying its hard drive or configuration. This lets you test drive an image before installing it. When you are done, just remove the USB drive and reboot. If you like what you see, you can then install MeeGo from the same live image.
1 Download the Live Image
The live image is available from the netbook downloads page. Save the image to a known location, so you can access it in step 2.
2 Byte-copy the image to a USB drive
You will need a USB drive with at least the capacity of the downloaded image.
Note: A byte-exact copy of the image must be placed on the USB drive. It is not sufficient to simply copy the image file to the drive. Be aware that the contents of the USB drive will be completely erased.
Linux Instructions
Be sure the USB drive is unmounted before proceeding. Some Linux distributions auto mount the USB drive when it is inserted, which can cause corruption when writing.
# umount <usb-drive>
Use either of these two methods:
Image Writer (recommended, requires Python >=2.4) Image Writer is a small python executable script that detects your USB drive and writes the image to it. The advantage of using image writer is that it will not inadvertently overwrite your system hard drive. Download Image Writer
# cd <directory with downloaded image-writer file> # chmod a+x ./image-writer # ./image-writer <image file>
Use 'dd' from the command-line Caution: 'dd' will overwrite any destination including your system hard disk. Make sure you know the correct value of <usb drive> before proceeding.
Be sure the USB drive is unmounted before proceeding. OS X auto mounts the USB drive when it is inserted, which can cause corruption when writing. You can press the eject icon in Finder or drag the USB icon to the trash.
Use this method (thanks to Many Ayromlou for the instructions):
Open a Terminal (Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal)
Run
diskutil list
to get the current list of devices
Insert your flash media
Run
diskutil list
again and determine the device node assigned to your flash media (for example /dev/disk2)
Run
diskutil unmountDisk /dev/diskN
(replace N with the disk number from the last command; in the previous example, N would be 2)
