Creating USB installation media in Linux

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• Using file roller
• Using unzip (main installers)
• Using dd (ISO image installations)
• Using the SteamOS-Mega-Downloader

Using file-roller (preferred)

File Roller is included in most distros, especially GNOME-variants. Recently I have had a bit of trouble having the installer find the USB drive as a CDROM device / install 100% correctly. The method that always worked reliably, was the GUI tool, file-roller. Simply format a drive as FAT32 using parted/gparted, and double click the ZIP archive. Extract the contents to the USB drive path.

Using unzip (main installers)

1. Locate you usb drive (e.g. /dev/sdX)

lsblk

2. Download either the standard or custom installer from the SteamOS download page
3. Locate the zip file in your GUI environment or in a terminal window.
4. unzip the contents directly to a formatted / clean FAT32-formatted USB drive, using a GUI archive utility, or a command such as below.

sudo unzip MyZipFile.zip -d /dev/sdX

Using dd (ISO image installations)

1. Download the installation media desired from Valve or the community installer pages
2. Open a terminal window and use the following syntax below.

Locate you usb drive (e.g. /dev/sdX)

lsblk

Create the image

sudo dd if=/path/to/installation/media.iso of=/dev/sdX

Using the SteamOS-Mega-Downloader

A fan-made downloader tool is available to download, verify, and image SteamOS to a USB drive or DVD disc (ISO images only). For more information, please see the wiki page over at SteamOS-Tools.