Hey VANLUG community,
We’ve all been there. You want to test a new distro or help a friend install Linux, but you can’t find a spare USB drive, or the only one you have is an old USB-A stick and the laptop only has USB-C.
I wanted to share a tool I found called ULLI (Universal Linux Live Installer) that solves this by making the process “USB-less.”
How it works: If you have Windows installed, you run the ULLI script (PowerShell/Batch), and it shrinks your current partition to create a small “live” area. It then downloads the ISO of your choice (it currently supports Mint, Ubuntu, Debian, and Fedora) and sets up the bootloader to point to that partition. When you reboot, you’re in the live environment just as if you’d booted from a flash drive.
Why this is useful for our group:
- Lower Barrier to Entry: Beginners can skip the “create bootable media” step, which is often where people get stuck.
- Hardware Independent: No need for flash drives or worrying about port compatibility.
- Speed: Installing from an internal SSD partition is significantly faster than most USB 2.0/3.0 drives.
Check out the demo and code here:
- GitHub: GitHub - rltvty2/ulli: USB-less Linux installer for Linux and Windows. Install Linux without a USB stick. · GitHub
- Demo Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3QOAVrhGTg
Note: As it’s in alpha, it’s probably best suited for testing on spare machines or for those comfortable with partitioning, but it’s a very clever approach to the “standard” install workflow.
Biggest issue I can see is that if you bork windows, or bork Linux, or worst case both, having a live USB is very handy for troubleshooting. But in those cases, you can always make a ventoy Linux USB key after installing Linux or with Rufus before using ulli, and then just have it as a backup should ulli fail.
Has anyone here experimented with USB-less installs before? What are your thoughts on using tools like this compared to investing in USBs we can give away?
Cheers!