Unetbootin for sure is not updated for years. I was doing one of those
two methods instead:
1. dd an ISO to USB worked well for years. BIOS/UEFI machines pick this
flash drive mostly with no issues. The only downside is that it is now
recognized as iso9660/udf/CDFS partition that's common for CD/DVD
drives, making it read-only. To make it writable again you must wipe
everything on the USB stick and create an MBR/GPT table on it again with
a new fresh partition. Still perfect for one-time installation of if you
won't use that stick to store/transfer other files.
2. You can also make a GPT table (sometimes MBR table works too) with a
single FAT32 partition on USB stick (GParted, parted, other partition
tool), then just copy all the files from the ISO on it. Most modern UEFI
systems will boot from it with no issues and you can still use the drive
as a normal flash drive, put other files on it, etc. You don't have to
make it ESP - UEFI normally should pick up a standard FAT32 partition
from a USB drive and try to boot a EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.EFI from it.
On 23.09.2025 18:54, Dr Rainer Woitok wrote:
Greetings,
just starting a routine upgrade I found the following in the "emerge"
output:
!!! The following installed packages are masked:
- sys-boot/unetbootin-702::gentoo (masked by: package.mask)
/var/db/repos/gentoo/profiles/package.mask:
# Andreas Sturmlechner <[email protected]> (2025-09-16)
# Abandoned upstream, based on Qt5, "must be run as root", then fails to
# start w/ current kde-plasma/kdesu-gui[X] within Wayland sessions too.
# Removal on 2025-10-16. Bug #957179
In the past I used this package to update the bootable image on my reco-
very USB stick, but now this no longer seems to be a good idea :-(
What are others using to create a bootable USB stick?
Sincerely,
Rainer
