Create a USB flash drive for linux on mac

Step 1: First insert the USB flash disk, open the terminal, and run the following command to check whether the USB flash disk has been mounted to the system. Then, you can see the USB flash disk under the Finder.

diskutil list

The system output is similar to the following:

star@star:Volumes$ diskutil list/dev/disk0   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *160.0 GB   disk0   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk0s1   2:                  Apple_HFS Macintosh HD            159.2 GB   disk0s2   3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk0s3/dev/disk1   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER   0:     Apple_partition_scheme                        *17.3 MB    disk1   1:        Apple_partition_map                         32.3 KB    disk1s1   2:                  Apple_HFS Flash Player            17.3 MB    disk1s2/dev/disk2   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER   0:     FDisk_partition_scheme                        *15.7 GB    disk2   1:             Windows_FAT_32 KINGSTON                15.7 GB    disk2s1

The above/dev/disk2 is the USB flash disk mount point.

Next, unmount the USB flash drive and run the following command:

diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk2

In this way, you have a USB flash drive that has been inserted but unmounted. At this time, you cannot see the USB flash drive under the Finder, but you can also see it using the diskutil list command.
Next, write the iso file for Linux installation to this USB flash drive. You can run the following command to complete this task:

dd if=~/Downloads/debian-6.0.6-i386-CD-1.iso of=/dev/disk2 bs=1m

This process takes about 5-10 minutes. After the process is completed, logs similar to the following will be output.

648+0 records in648+0 records out679477248 bytes transferred in 447.883182 secs (1517086 bytes/sec)

In this way, you can install a USB flash drive on Linux. The next step is to install the system and other things.