That's a very nice writeup, but seems like a lot of work to do something that can be done with one line of code on my FreeBSD box.
Insert your USB stick and make sure it is NOT mounted. Use the cd command to change directories to where the .iso is you want to work with, then run:
Code:
# dd if=./nameof.iso of=/dev/da0 bs=512k
I've used that command to make bootable USB sticks with Debian and Kali .iso files on several occasions. Of course, the syntax for where the USB stick resides will be different on Linux (sda2 maybe?) but I don't know why it wouldn't work.
Please correct me if I am mistaken.