I’ve been trying to find a linux programming similar to Rufus to flash images of OSes on a thumb drive.
Nothing from the listicles on the internet or the programs in flatpak have worked for me as well as Rufus on Windows.
What have you used that’s worked well? Or, could I run Rufus on my linux machine with WINE?
One of these should do what you’re looking for. Each has a slightly different approach.
+1 for ventoy. With that you can just flash ventoy on it once, then copy iso’s over to the usb drive without reformatting or reflashing anything.
From this list, only Unetbootin can create Windows installation disk. For this, there is also WoeUSB but it’s CLI only.
Ventoy can do windows installations as well
Ventoy kicks ass for a multi-boot drive. Just drop the ISO on the drive and Ventoy sees it. Slick
My honest recommendation is dd It works, it does it’s job, and doesn’t need to many bells and whistles. My only complaint is that there isn’t an easy way to show progress. But as a background command, it works.
What?
Rufus just flashes ISOs to disks. On Linux you can doo that with
- udisksctl or dd
- Impression
- Fedora Media Writer
- KDE Iso Image writer
- Balena Etcher
But you are talking about something completely different and Ventoy does that.
Or just cat file.img > /dev/…
I think you should use dd for that?
using dd for that is outdated info that everyone keeps blindly parroting with zero understanding why. cat is simpler and works fine.
note: both cat and dd only work for this when the image is made in a compatible way, my linux isos always work fine but a windows iso didnt and needs a more specific tool.
cat is for writing files, dd for writing disks.
Can you explain how this can work?
/dev/sdX
is a file, and bothdd
,cat
can read files in full. You can even try something likezstd
to compress it too.One of the nice things about
dd
though is you can see the progress with--status=progress