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TITRE / Multisystems This is my first tutorial for the magazine, having done a 'My Story' piece a few years ago. As a member of the community, and, for those who don't know me, currently one of the presenters of the Full Circle Podcast, I thought I would pen a few words to help out – given the recent calls for content. This is a tutorial on how to install and use the free MultiSystem application released under the GPL v3 license, for creating USB sticks containing more than one 'live' ISO image that can be booted from the USB flash drive. This can be useful given that the price of high capacity Flash drives has come down to less than £20 here in the UK. It is not uncommon for people to have at least a 16GB (or greater) stick in hand for creating a USB boot drive. Having a selection of distros and utility disks for system rescue, or just a partitioning disk, can be a useful addition to the Geek’s tool box. This tool makes it possible to carry all of these on one USB drive instead of having multiple drives with just one image on each. First we need to install Multisystem. As this is not currently in the Ubuntu repositories by default, we will need to install the ppa, the instructions for this are found on the MultiSystem web page at: http://liveusb.info/dotclear/ The first thing you will notice is that the page is in French as this application has been developed by a French developer; this is not a problem as most web browsers provide translation tools to convert to the language of you choice.
On the right hand side of the page is a series of menus; scroll down to the one titled MultiSystem (free software) and select the installation page. This will direct you to the page that has the instructions for installing the PPA into your package manager. At this stage note that you must go back to the original French by pressing the 'Show Original' in the translation tool bar. This is because the translation software removes some of the spaces in the commands and if they are not inputted correctly you will get an error message when running them in the terminal; this caught me out the first time I installed the application on to a system. Assuming you've done everything correctly, you should now have MultiSystem installed. To access the application in Mint or Lubuntu, I navigate to Applications and MultiSystem is in that menu; depending on your version of Ubuntu you may need to search to find it. Before opening the application, select a USB drive where you want to install it, and ensure it is clean and formatted to FAT32; you can use MultiSystem to do this with gparted, or use it as standalone application. If inclined and able, you could use the terminal with fdisc, but whatever you use be careful you format the correct drive. Remount the drive and open MultiSystem and you should see the following screen:
It has correctly identified the USB Flash drive I have on the PC. If you have more than one drive connected to the PC, ensure you select the correct one that you want to use – it will wipe the drive in the following processes. The selected drive is highlighted in green. Press confirm and the following screen will appear: Insert your password and press return and the following screen comes up: Don't panic; this is just saying that as it is the first time you wish to use the USB drive as a MultiSystem disc it needed to label the drive. Unplug the drive and remount it; now restart MultiSystem, repeat the first step and you should get this screen: Select OK and this screen will appear: You are now ready to start to install as many live ISO images as the Drive will hold although at this point I should say that not all distros I've installed have worked. I've had problems with OpenSuse despite its supposed support.
To install a live ISO, simply click the arrow and another pop up will appear (shown above) Search for the ISO you want on your system and double click to add it to the left hand column then click create. Depending on the size of your drive, you can select several ISO's at this stage, but you can add them at a later date if needed. You will be prompted for your password; enter this and the install will begin. This may take some time so depending on the size of the image or images you have picked. Once complete, the install screen will re-appear. At this stage it may seem like nothing has changed; shutdown the application and restart, you will then see this screen: To add another ISO at a later date just mount the drive, start up MultiSystem, and you will go to the install screen and you just repeat the process. To use the Drive as a boot device, install in a USB port on the selected PC/Laptop. On startup, select boot from USB drive (on a lot of modern systems the boot menu is accessed by pressing F12 but yours may differ). You should now see this screen. The number of options you have will vary depending on what you have installed on the drive. You can now select the ISO you wish to boot and you’re on your way. As I have said, this is not a perfect piece of software: even after a reinstall, my desktop Multisystem will no longer label a Drive and I have to start the process out on a laptop I have it installed on. As a tool for creating a multi-booting USB disc, I have found this invaluable and I now generally carry around a 32GB USB drive with several Linux distros and a number of rescue utilities installed. It comes in handy demonstrating Linux to people at the various events I find myself attending, and at the Blackpool LUG and maker-space where it is used regularly.