So I wanted to install linux on a mac mini that I have. They are great because they take up so little room and you can stick them so easily. The tricky part is how to make a usb stick that the mac mini will boot of. As you can see these commands are carried out on my mac laptop. Make sure you do not dd your internal hard drive. Once these steps are completed you should be able to boot off the usb stick and complete the Linux instillation.
laptop:Downloads user$ hdiutil convert -format UDRW -o target.img CentOS-7-x86_64-Minimal-1511.iso
Reading Master Boot Record (MBR : 0)…
Reading CentOS 7 x86_64 (Apple_ISO : 1)…
Reading (Type EF : 2)…
.
Reading CentOS 7 x86_64 (Apple_ISO : 3)…
.................................................................................................................................................
Elapsed Time: 8.612s
Speed: 70.0Mbytes/sec
Savings: 0.0%
created: /Users/user/Downloads/target.img.dmg
laptop:Downloads user$ diskutil list
/dev/disk0 (internal, physical):
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *121.3 GB disk0
1: EFI EFI 209.7 MB disk0s1
2: Apple_CoreStorage ;) 120.5 GB disk0s2
3: Apple_Boot Recovery HD 650.0 MB disk0s3
/dev/disk1 (internal, virtual):
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: Apple_HFSX ;) +120.1 GB disk1
Logical Volume on disk0s2
BB443DB6-4F8C-420F-BE48-911D731081F9
Unlocked Encrypted
/dev/disk2 (external, physical):
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *2.0 GB disk2
1: Microsoft Basic Data Untitled 2.0 GB disk2s1
/dev/disk3 (disk image):
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme +29.2 MB disk3
1: Apple_HFS UNetbootin 29.1 MB disk3s1
laptop:Downloads user$ diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk2
Unmount of all volumes on disk2 was successful
laptop:Downloads user$ time sudo dd if=target.img.dmg of=/dev/disk2 bs=1m
Password:
602+1 records in
602+1 records out
632262656 bytes transferred in 235.989425 secs (2679199 bytes/sec)
real 3m58.249s
user 0m0.013s
sys 0m8.404s