Linux

47952 readers

1439 users here now

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

Rules

Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
No misinformation
No NSFW content
No hate speech, bigotry, etc

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

166

ISOs Explained + four programs to make Linux boot media (makertube.net)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

83 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (3 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 months ago

Replace cat with pv to get a progress bar for free

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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 :)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 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