The only working PC I have is a 32-bit x86 and has a minimal Debian installation. I need to flash a USB with an ISO file from it to make a live system. I tried for a few days to get flathub or appimage working there, but just can’t. I decided an apt package would be the easiest course of action, but neither Rufus, Impress or BalenaEtcher seem to be available in default repos. It there a program that is there? A bare .elf executable with no packaging would also be fine.

    • nitroemdash@lemmy.wtfOP
      6·
      12 days ago

      Thanks, seems it worked. It should be noted that /dev/ over normal /run/media/ path can be found with lsblk command, out of 2 with identical letter use latter with digit

  • Sophienomenal@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    6·
    12 days ago

    As others have said, dd will work, or if you really want, you can download the x86 Linux AppImage file from Balena’s website, extract it, then just run it (you may need to mark it as executable first). Should work just fine, and it’ll give you the same GUI as always

  • rowinxavier@lemmy.world
    5·
    11 days ago

    Other people have obviously pointed it out, but this is one of the many areas in Linux where the command line is so much easier than an interface that the people who write GUI tools just don’t bother. The tool you need for a command line approach is called dd (I imagine it stands for direct data because that is what it does). Using dd you can take data from one place and put it into another. This means you can put zeros all over a drive, wiping it in full, using

    dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/targetdevice

    That will fill the whole drive with zeroes, but you could also do it with random noise first, using the below

    dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/targetdevice

    In the case of your ISO image there is someone who has included all the options including block size and so on, but the step you really need is to be sure you get the right device. Execuse the command below

    ls /dev

    Then insert your device, wait a few seconds, and run it again. You will have a list of all of the devices that were connected before and after plugging your drive in, so your drive will be the new one. It will probably show up as something like

    /dev/sdc
/dev/sdc1

    Notice that there are two. The first is the device, the second is the partition on the device. If you tried to put the content of an ISO image into an existing partition it would look like it had all worked but it would actually fail because the ISO is a full rip of a device, not a partition. Instead use the device itself, in this case sdc.

    dd if=/path/to/image.iso of=/dev/sdc bs=4M; sync

    The last bit will make your system write things to the disk and make it safe to eject it. Once that is all done it should work as a bootable USB.

    It seems super complex but once you have done it a few times it becomes so easy you will regret the time spent getting a GUI installed.

    If you still want a GUI you could try Gnome Disks, but I never enjoyed using it.

  • Mereo@piefed.caEnglish
    5·
    12 days ago

    The ones that come to my mind that you can install from APT are:

    • gnome-disk-utility
    • isoimagewriter
  • Vik@lemmy.worldEnglish
    51·
    12 days ago

    you should be able to create bootable flash drives with dd

    • adarza@piefed.caEnglish
      1·
      12 days ago

      yup. works very well. been using it whenever an image fails to boot properly on my multiboot usb…

  • tasankovasara@sopuli.xyz
    2·
    11 days ago

    Scrolled a while and didn’t see it:

    dd if=image.iso of=/dev/yourstick bs=4M ; sync

    And what is yourstick? lsblk and determine by size. Use the device node, not a partition, e.g. /dev/sdb and not /dev/sdb1.

  • hr_@lemmy.world
    2·
    11 days ago

    mkusb is a simple bash script around dd to make things easier. I always have it installed on my laptop, in my ~/bin/.