Create a Multi-boot USB Stick with MultiSystem

Productivity Sauce

Thanks to tools like Unetbootin and Ubuntu's Startup Disk Creator, creating a bootable USB stick with your favorite Linux distro has never been easier. But both of these utilities have one tiny shortcoming: they allow you to install only one distro on a USB stick. Enter MultiSystem, a nifty tool that can squeeze several distros on to a single USB stick. Not only that, MultiSystem lets you add a persistent storage for each distro, and the tool automatically generates a boot menu with a few handy options.

An older version of MultiSystem is available in the Ubuntu software repository, but if you want to install the very latest release of the tool, you can do so using a few simple commands:

deb http://liveusb.info/multisystem/depot all main
wget -q http://liveusb.info/multisystem/depot/multisystem.asc -O- | sudo apt-key add -
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install multisystem

Using MultiSystem to create a multi-boot USB stick is not particularly difficult. Insert the USB stick, launch the MultiSystem utility, and hit the Validate button to set up the stick. Grab then the ISO image of the distro you want to add and drop it on to the Drag/Drop ISO/img section of the MultiSystem window. The utility then prompts you to specify the size of a persistent storage space, and once you've done that, the utility takes care of the rest. In a similar manner, add other distros to the USB stick. To make sure that the USB stick actually works, MultiSystem conveniently provides the ability to test the stick using either the QEMU or VirtualBox virtualization software.

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