Use the arrow keys to highlight the Linux drive, and press “ Return/Enter“. If you're using Windows, you'll need to install a USB driver if one. Now you’ll need to boot that Linux system. Set up your computer to detect the device If you're using a Mac, you can skip this step. Here, you will see all of the drives that your Mac can be booted up from, including the “Macintosh HD” which contains macOS Sierra. Most probably, you will only have two options available, one of which will be “Macintosh HD” and other will be the Linux USB drive dubbed “ Windows or EFI“. Running Linux live off an external drive. Then, press the power button, and press and hold the “option” key, until you reach the “ Startup Manager“.Ģ. In fact, the help page to make a USB boot stick for Mac recommends going the CD route. AFAIK, nobody ever has trouble going that route. Unless your optical drive is broken, I would highly recommend just burning a CD and using the optical drive. Keep the Live USB plugged in to your Mac, and shut it down. You say you want to run the stick (install Ubuntu) on a two year old MacBook (not the MacBook Air).
#CAN YOU USE A USB TO RUN UBUNTU ON A MAC HOW TO#
If you don’t know how to open Startup Manager on Mac, just follow the steps given below:ġ. Now that the Live USB has been created, let’s see how we can boot into it, using the Mac Startup Manager. If you want any changes you made to persist between reboots, you can do that by setting a value under “ space used to preserve files across reboots (Ubuntu only)“. So, if you install apps, and create documents in Ubuntu while it is in Live mode, they will not be available the next time you fire up the OS with its Live USB. Note : By default, when you shut down a Live Session, any changes you make are deleted. If the USB drive is removed, you will get a Grub command line. Once the installation is complete, Ubuntu will boot up from the USB drive if it's plugged in.
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UNetbootin will now work through a couple of steps, and create a bootable Live USB that you can use to boot into Linux, on your Mac. Install a fresh copy of OSX on the external drive and then install Ubuntu on the same external drive as you would a dual boot system.