Unetbootin should (or even needs to) be invoked from a root login prompt as it needs access to drive devices. Unless you have modified the default PATH inheritance, sudo won't work properly (at least syslinux will not be found). It sometimes reacts in a strange way when it comes to language settings. When the detection fails, there is a good chance that it will display in (taiwanese) chinese, as it seems to use the last language file it can find (which is unetbootin_zh_TW.qm). If unetbootin does not respect your LANG settings, especially when invoked from the menu of an user account with kdesu, there are two ways to change it's behaviour: 1. Open /usr/share/applications/unetbootin.desktop and change the Exec entry to something like this: Exec=/usr/bin/unetbootin lang=en The available language files are in /usr/share/applications/unetbootin. 2. Open a terminal and start unetbootin like this: su -c '/usr/bin/unetbootin lang=de'