Linux boot media need not be tricky! In today's episode, I'll talk about four ways to flash an ISO from Windows (and other systems too). I know a lot of you are switching to Linux because of Micros...
  • jaxiiruff@lemmy.zip
    9·
    3 months ago

    Not everyone likes to use commands for something as trivial as this, its nice to press a couple buttons and wait for it to be done vs learning how dd works and what arguments to use etc.

    • Fonzie!@ttrpg.network
      5·
      3 months ago

      Not everyone likes to install compicated graphical software which does a thousand and one things it shouldn’t do just to copy files to an external drive

    • foudinfo@jlai.lu
      14·
      3 months ago

      My favorite way to create a boot media is simply to use cat. No arguments, no shenanigans just a cat into the device :

      cat debian.iso > /dev/sda

      • qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website
        2·
        3 months ago

        One caveat is that you will need write access to the drive, which probably means you need to run as root — can’t run that with sudo as-is, unlike dd.

        • foudinfo@jlai.lu
          2·
          3 months ago

          Yep that’s right, but I use fdisk to check my drives before writing on them and it also requires sudo…

          • qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website
            1·
            3 months ago

            Right, I just meant that you can’t sudo cat file > /dev/sda but you can sudo dd ..., because IO redirection isn’t elevated to root with sudo. I’m not saying anything too profound :)

            • foudinfo@jlai.lu
              2·
              3 months ago

              Oh right, my bad x) I agree, it’s a little bit akward to use su then cat everytime.

      • Ghoelian@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        4·
        3 months ago

        iirc there was a reason you should use dd instead of directly copying the data, I think something to do with device block alignment or something?

        • foudinfo@jlai.lu
          1·
          3 months ago

          That could be possible but for the moment I didn’t encouter any problem with cat. I think I’m going to stick with it for the time being.