Most software professionals working in the industry are provided with IT managed computers. The IT “assets” are usually MS-Windows laptops or desktops. Very few IT departments support Mac OS X and far fewer support Linux.
Systems that require software often run on Linux because the run-time license is free and massive amount of open source software is available without license fees. Therefore, development requires using Linux. If your product is actually a small computer it will likely run Linux. Therefore, you will find yourself needing to boot a small computer using a USB stick. Linux is provided via ISO files, which are designed to be burned to CD/DVD-ROM. Your small computer will just have a USB slot. Therefore you’ll need to make a bootable USB stick.
If you are fortunate enough to have a Mac, you can create a bootable USB stick easily, without resorting to downloading software from a (hopefully) trusted website. However, you will need permisison to run sudo on your Mac.
The procedure is as follows:
- Download the desired ISO file
- Open the Terminal application
- Convert the .iso file to .img using the convert option of hdiutil:
% hdiutil convert -format UDRW -o target.img source.iso
