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
      1·
      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
        2·
        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
        1·
        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
          1·
          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
          0·
          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.