GNOME MultiWriter is a useful tool for organizations and individuals shipping Live Linux distros in USB devices… or if you want to create multiple bootable pen drives of your favourite distro for all your family members. Author Richard Hughes has announced the availability of the tool in his a few hours back. Originally a part of the ColorHug project, MultiWriter is now an independent tool on GitHub. The author intends to move the project to git.gnome.org.

The utility writes a .img or .iso file to multiple USB devices at once. The limit at the time of writing is 24 devices. However, users have reported that the performance on regular hardware deteriorates rapidly with more than 10 devices. USB devices with capacity ranging from 1GB to 32GB are supported.

Some specific use cases for MultiWriter:

Copy a specific ISO for QA testing for a small number of users

Create a GNOME LiveCD of Fedora Rawhide for a code sprint

Create hundreds of LiveUSB drives for the ColorHug project

Installation

The tool is in a very nascent state at the time of writing and depends on GNOME libraries tightly. Steps to compile from source:

$ git clone https://github.com/hughsie/gnome-multi-writer.git $ cd gnome-multi-writer $ ./autogen.sh $ make

Webpage: MultiWriter