Making a Fedora Bootable USB in Ubuntu

So it's the New Year, and we all want to try a new Linux distro...don't we? Well, having read some fairly old news about the bleeding edge software which is always available on Fedora (namely due to it's counterpart RedHat), I thought I might jump into it.

So how to install it? I don't use CDs these days, so out the window goes option 1. But why not use a Bootable USB? Ubuntu and Windows can do it...so here's a little step through with some pointers when making the Fedora Bootable USB (you can run it Live to test drive it also!).

I've had to make the USB in Ubuntu and the first thing I learnt is that Fedora cannot be copied to the USB device using the StartUp Disk Creator. Instead, it must be copied using the dd command at the terminal. This is quite useful, but like always, I ran into problems...loading failed from the USB. You can find a lot of useful information at this Fedora site, but being an Ubuntu user, I'm really wanting an easier solution...I couldn't follow the instructions properly but I think my problem lies elsewhere.

 N.B: It has been suggested by users such as Linux4UnMe that Fedora is for the intermediate to experienced user and that platform stability may not be to the expectations of Ubuntu users

So with all that in mind, grab your USB stick of choice and let's get started!

Firstly, you'll want to format the USB stick with filesystem type FAT32. I'm using DiskUtility here since Ubuntu users may be familiar with that.

Then, you'll want to make it bootable.

Now close DiskUtil.

Open up terminal and verify the location of the USB device. If no other USB drives are connected, it will most likely be sdb. Not all output has been added here.

$ sudo fdisk -l
...Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x0008d91d

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1   *          62    15650907     7825423    c  W95 FAT32 (LBA)

NB: The difference between sdb and sdb1 is that sdb is indicating the entire device, whereas sdb1 is only indicating partition 1 on the device sdb

Hopefully you'll already have a copy of the latest and greatest release of Fedora. Navigate to where the .iso is located. Now as mentioned above, we want to copy the .iso over to our USB using dd. Note that ./ is prepended to the .iso file. While I'm unsure on its' use, this has worked for me. I'll update this post when I find out (until then use with caution).

$ sudo dd if=./Fedora-X-X-Live-KDE.iso of=/dev/sdb bs=8M

The options here are:
if > in file
of > out file
bs > amount of bytes to be read at a time (maybe not required)

The task should finish with the following output:

87+0 records in
87+0 records out
729808896 bytes (730 MB) copied, 290.328 s, 2.5 MB/s 

Finally, a small hiccup when installed may be that it still fails to load. When your computer starts up, hit the button to bring you to the boot option screen, then select your USB device. Now you should have a Fedora screen that looks like this:

With the root= option, you may have the change the live:CDLABEL to live:LABEL. However, only do so if it fails to load at first.

Hope this has helped with making a Fedora USB bootable and you are up an running in no time!

Enjoy, Ciao!