Ubuntu – Does usb-creator-gtk require root access

Creating and installing Multiple Distros in to USB / Pendrive involves two parts:-

• Creating Multiple Live distro Using Multicd.sh. From the link:

"After googling around for few days i found this useful script from www.multicd.tuxfamily.org. Multicd.sh is a shell script written by maybeway36 which enables two or more Live Linux distros / utilities to be able to boot from single CD/DVD. It is really very simple to create multi Live Linux distro in a single disc. Create a folder in your home folder and name it as multicd. Put all the live Linux iso images along with multicd.sh script inside multicd folder. Close the window. Open terminal and give the following commands

cd multicd
chmod +x multicd*.sh
sudo ./multicd*.sh

Above commands will execute multicd.sh. While executing, this script will download few packages from Internet and make a new iso image called multicd.iso for you inside multicd folder. Check the size of multicd.iso image file. If it exceeds more than 700 mb then you must insert DVD to write it. Choose burn image option from your favorite image burning software to write multicd.iso file. Upon reboot, with the CD/DVD present inside CD/DVD drive, new GRUB will display list of live distros available in the disc. Choose your favorite one to login...

Note: When you download any Linux iso image from internet it will look like this "ubuntu-9.04-desktop-i386" but this has to be renamed as ubuntu.iso (inside multicd folder). Presently this script supports 20 live distros. List of Live Linux distros supported in this script are given below (and the names accepted by this script are on the right side of each distro)."

There's a list of distro's on the blog page.

• Installing Multiple Live distro in to a USB / Pendrive.

UNetbootin allows you to create bootable Live USB drives for Ubuntu, Fedora, and other Linux distributions without burning a CD. It runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. You can either let UNetbootin download one of the many distributions supported out-of-the-box for you, or supply your own Linux .iso file if you've already downloaded one or your preferred distribution isn't on the list.

Support amongst others: Ubuntu (and official derivatives) 8.04 LTS 9.10 10.04 LTS 10.10 11.04 Daily CD Images, Fedora 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, Rawhide and lots lots more.

If you look at them image you can choose distro's or download ISO's yourself and add them or add a custom. And you can set this up on a hard disc or a USB flash drive.

I hope it is enough information but there is a lot more info on this blog.

First, one question is why you want to switch to EFI-mode booting. Based on your gdisk output, it looks like you've got a single-OS installation, so you don't seem to need to coexist with something else. If you can boot in BIOS/CSM/legacy mode already, why switch? As the saying goes, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." (OTOH, I see no BIOS Boot Partition, so maybe you can't currently boot in BIOS mode....)

Supposing you have a reason to boot in EFI mode, though, let's start at the beginning....

YUMI is not the only tool for creating a bootable USB flash drive. You can also do it with dd, UNetbootin, Startup Disk Creator, Rufus, and other tools. All of the tools I've named are capable of creating an EFI-bootable USB flash drive, with the caveat that EFI implementations differ, so what works on one might not work on another. Some tools also have options that can affect how well a created disk will work, either in general or on a specific EFI. Thus, creating your installation disk with another tool should enable you to boot it in EFI mode (assuming, of course, that your computer uses an EFI rather than a traditional BIOS). That said, if you've already installed, re-creating your boot medium and re-installing is overkill....

If you have no other bootable OS on the computer, one solution is to install an EFI boot loader as EFI/BOOT/bootx64.efi on the EFI System Partition (ESP; your /dev/sda1). This is easily done if you're installing by hand, but if you're using a tool like grub-install, you'll have to move files around manually after the fact. Specifically, the EFI version of grub-install will put GRUB in EFI/ubuntu/grubx64.efi (perhaps with shimx64.efi in the same directory). You'll have to copy files to the right location to get them to launch when you boot the computer. If Secure Boot is inactive, copy EFI/ubuntu/grubx64.efi to EFI/BOOT/bootx64.efi. You might also need to copy EFI/ubuntu/grub.cfg to EFI/BOOT/grub.cfg, too. If Secure Boot is active, it gets more complex; you must copy shimx64.efi to EFI/BOOT/bootx64.efi and copy grubx64.efi to EFI/BOOT/grubx64.efi. (Note that all these filenames are relative to the ESP's root, so if you were to mount partitions as shown in your /etc/fstab, you must add /boot/efi/ to the start of each path.) With a boot loader installed to EFI/BOOT/bootx64.efi and nothing else referenced in the NVRAM entries, your computer should boot from that "fallback" filename.

Another option is to prepare an Ubuntu installer using one of the tools I mentioned earlier, then boot it in EFI mode. With that done, you should be able to run Boot Repair in EFI mode, so it should be able to set up GRUB in that mode. In fact, even in BIOS mode, Boot Repair should be able to copy EFI files as described in the previous paragraph. (I'm not sure how well this works in practice, though; Boot Repair might just try to do a BIOS-mode repair and not attempt to set up an EFI fallback boot loader.)

Yet another option is to use my rEFInd boot manager to get the process started. You can download the CD-R or USB flash drive version of rEFInd and boot from it. rEFInd should detect your Linux kernel(s) and enable you to boot. If this works, you'll be booted in EFI mode, and you can then install the rEFInd PPA or Debian package to use it permanently (without the USB drive); or you can install GRUB via grub-install and it should set things up correctly. (Note that you'll need the EFI GRUB package, grub-efi, installed for grub-install to set up the EFI version of GRUB.) Whether you install rEFInd or GRUB in this way, it will be able to set up an EFI NVRAM entry, since the boot from the rEFInd USB drive will be into EFI mode, thus enabling the OS to add EFI NVRAM variables.