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...
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.
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
Right, I just meant that you can’t sudocat file > /dev/sda but you can sudodd ..., because IO redirection isn’t elevated to root with sudo. I’m not saying anything too profound :)
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.
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
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/sdaReplace cat with pv to get a progress bar for free
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
sudoas-is, unlikedd.Yep that’s right, but I use fdisk to check my drives before writing on them and it also requires sudo…
Right, I just meant that you can’t
sudo cat file > /dev/sdabut you cansudo dd ..., because IO redirection isn’t elevated to root with sudo. I’m not saying anything too profound :)Oh right, my bad x) I agree, it’s a little bit akward to use su then cat everytime.
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?
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.