LinuxLive USB Creator is a small, neat and handy application that helps you quickly and easily create bootable virtualized USB sticks containing Linux distributions.
As far as I can see, LinuxLive USB Creator can be used for two main purposes. One of them is to test almost any Linux distribution directly from Windows, from the USB stick, without altering the existing Windows installation. It’s a really easy, fast and convenient manner of playing around with Linux distributions without any cost or any trouble to care about. This way you can get the hang of Linux distros like Ubuntu, Fedora, Slax, CentOS, ArchLinux, Gentoo, Debian, Open SUSE, Mint, and many more, in a really comfortable way. Furthermore, you don’t even have to reboot the system in order to try the Linux distro, thanks to the built-in virtualization function that LinuxLive USB Creator offers.
The other main purpose of this handy tool is offering a way to install Linux distros from a USB flash drive instead of CDs.
For both the two purposes, portability is a very important advantage. The fact that you can carry your USB stick with you around everywhere, and also have the Linux distro at your disposal wherever you are, is an undeniably cool benefit.
The large number of supported Linux distros is also an important advantage of this neat tool, but I’ve seen similar applications that support even more distros. I think a more relevant benefit of LinuxLive USB Creator, also known as LiLi USB Creator, is its hidden installation feature – this smart tool can hide the Linux installation on the USB stick, making the USB stick look clean as if it doesn't carry a Linux installation on it.
Other cool features offered by this tool is the support for integrity checks of the ISO files containing the installations and the fact that it can format and use USB drives larger than 32 GB.
To sum it all up, LinuxLive USB Creator is a really nice tool and it is completely free. It makes installing and testing Linux distros a simple job that anyone can perform without any problem.
v2.9 [Aug 31, 2014]
New major features:
- Improved support for 64-bit variants.
- Support for ReactOS / OpenMandrivaLX / CDLinux.
- Smarter autodetection of Syslinux version, INITRD and VMLINUZ files.
- Retry to format 5 times instead of 1 (with 5 seconds delay).
- Retry to install boot sectors 5 times instead of 1 (with 5 seconds delay).
- Error is returned to user when formatting failed.
- Autorun creation has been disabled (can be re-enabled in the advanced options).
- Code has been simplified and commented.
- Storage controller in virtualbox is automatically changed to the best one (IDE or SCSI) to improve chances of booting.
- Type of VM automatically set (useful for 64-bit Linux).
Improvements:
- Flush old logs (keep 1 month).
- Latest AutoIT compiler 3.3.12.0
- Syslinux 5 and 6 support.
- fat32Format 1.07 (GPT support fix for boot sector when using Windows AIK's bootsect.exe).
- Use a more reliable method to fetch UUID/MBRID and physical drive numbers.
- Recognition options can be changed without reselecting the ISO.
- Changelog on website will give more info (new distribs, major features, improvements, fixed bugs and known bugs).
- Warning when selecting a ZIP file containing only an ISO.
- Improved sourceforge download from global mirrors.
- Lighter compatibility list, should be faster to load.
- New languages : Armenian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Estonian, Malay, Persian (Farsi).
- Default RAM requirement for VirtualBox is now 384 MB.
- Removed unmaintained/unpopular distro : Meego / WifiWay / LiveHacking /Elive / Vyatta / Vortexbox / VectorLinux / Zenwalk / Zenix / SolusOS / PureOS / BlankOn.
Fixed bugs:
- fix some crash when WMI was corrupted/not working.
- Could not cancel download when selecting the destination folder.
- Previous betas may not check for new beta availability (and option display was wrong).
- Removed windows 7/8 progress bar in taskbar because it was crashing on other OSes.
- Hiren's boot / Fedora / CentOS support was broken/compromised.
- Icons/names changed on all drives (autorun creation is now disabled by default).
Known Bugs:
- Graphic interface may flickers or hang when LiLi is busy but usually comes back.
- cannot stop a Linux download unless you shut LiLi down.
- Asian characters not displaying in the progress bar.
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