this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2024
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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.
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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.
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
Replace cat with pv to get a progress bar for free
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.
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, 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/sda
but 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.
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