One of the biggest hassles for me, as a Linux user and hobbyist, has been creating bootable flash drives to use as live and/or installation media. Unetbootin works but "not always" and figuring out the proper syntax to use from the command line always boggles my mind. Here's the solution. Seriously, this stand-alone app worked for me and was super easy to use. It's also available for both Windows and Linux. https://www.balena.io/etcher/
One of the biggest hassles for me, as a Linux user and hobbyist, has been creating bootable flash drives to use as live and/or installation media.
I don't use the GUIs. I download the medium, let's say to /tmp, with: wget https://whatever/mydistro.iso # insert USB drive # use df or mount to see what devices/partitions got mounted with that # insertion. assume here that it's /dev/sdu1, though it will more often # be something like /dev/sdb1 or /dev/sdd1, but I don't want to give # example dd commands with /dev/sdd in case someone just pastes it in. sudo umount /dev/sdu1 sudo dd if=mydistro.iso of=/dev/sdu bs=10M # note no '1' sync sync # pull out the USB drive I do a lot of them to give out to students, and I like to have it in my shell history.
One of the biggest hassles for me, as a Linux user and hobbyist, has been creating bootable flash drives to use as live and/or installation media.
I don't use the GUIs. I download the medium, let's say to /tmp, with:
[PS: I'm not saying this to recommend against your approach; just showing how I do it.]
NMLGugers, I have shifted to the commandline for this, though I will propagate Ubuntu versions with the supplied GUI application. My most recent trial of other OS's was to make some MX usb's thus: sudo dd bs=4M if=MX-19.x_x64_copy.iso of=/dev/sdb which is sudo dd bs=4M if=TheISOofChoice of=/dev/YourUsb; run this from whichever folder the File.iso resides in. I let the ISO file reside in "Downloads" and use the terminal to navigate there and proceed with 'dd' and use 'sudo' privileges as the access to the /dev/sdb requires root privileges. It takes a bit of practice and patience. Practice to follow a preferred variation of the 'dd' syntax and patience to let the process finish - it may take 8-10 minutes for it to complete while it seems to hang. 'top' may indicate a "D" for uninterruptible sleep, but it will finish out, just wait. I encourage everybody to have a method to create install usb's and share them with friends. By the way, MX was recommended by the ABQLUG and is an interesting variant GnuLinux. Practice on this is worth the effort and dd is always in your GnuLinux system. Thank you, Ted P On Tue, Sep 29, 2020 at 12:26 PM Mark Galassi <mark@galassi.org> wrote:
One of the biggest hassles for me, as a Linux user and hobbyist, has been creating bootable flash drives to use as live and/or installation media.
I don't use the GUIs. I download the medium, let's say to /tmp, with:
[PS: I'm not saying this to recommend against your approach; just showing how I do it.] _______________________________________________ nmglug mailing list nmglug@lists.nmglug.org http://lists.nmglug.org/listinfo.cgi/nmglug-nmglug.org
One of the biggest hassles for me, as a Linux user and hobbyist, has been creating bootable flash drives to use as live and/or installation media.
Mark Galassi writes:
I don't use the GUIs. [ ... ] sudo dd if=mydistro.iso of=/dev/sdu bs=10M # note no '1'
I use dd too, when I can. But there are a few things it can't do: - If the ISO you're using isn't already set up to boot from a USB stick, then dd-ing it will give you something that has an OS on it but isn't bootable. - It's possible to set up a bootable USB with an overlay partition so that you can make changes to the filesystem (for instance, install a couple of extra programs you want to use). But you won't get that with dd unless whoever set up the ISO included that, whereas some of the specialized ISO copying programs can add that for you. I haven't had any better luck than Don has with programs like Unetbootin, but I understand why people might sometimes want something beyond dd. ...Akkana
participants (4)
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Akkana Peck -
Don Crowder -
Mark Galassi -
Ted Pomeroy