Colin Watson announced recently that starting with June 16th, 2011, all daily builds and final releases of the Ubuntu operating system will be distributed as hybrid CD and USB ISO images.
The "hybrid ISO" feature was present in all major Linux distributions, except Debian and, of course, Ubuntu. It was missing from all Debian-based distributions because it would break Jigdo downloads. Therefore the developers are now using xorriso to generate the CD images.
The hybrid ISO functionality allows users to copy the content of the ISO image directly on a formatted USB stick, without the use of external USB creator tools such as UNetbootin or Ubuntu's Startup Disk Creator.
Hybrid ISO functionality is provided for desktop, alternate and server images, for both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures.
Users who want to transfer an Ubuntu ISO image to an USB flash drive can now mount and directly copy the contents of the ISO image using a file manager or the dd command.
However, those who want to create a persistent USB device still need to rely on external utilities, like the Ubuntu USB creator.
"I realise that we're behind a number of other major distributions on this. The delay was because (like Debian) we couldn't simply use isohybrid because that would break jigdo downloads, so we had to switch to xorriso as the CD image generator on these architectures for its new JTE support, and by the time all that landed in Debian I didn't really want to cram it into 11.04." - said Colin Watson.
Among other features that will be present in the upcoming Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) release, we can mention Linux kernel 3.0, GNOME 3,
LightDM login manager, Unity 2D, and many more.
Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) will be the 15th release of the Ubuntu operating system. See you all on June 30th, for an in-depth article about the Ubuntu 11.10 Alpha 2 development release.
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