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Bootloader equivalent to Rufus (lemm.ee)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

55 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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?

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 5 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Or just cat file.img > /dev/....

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (2 children)

I think you should use dd for that?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

using dd for that is outdated info that everyone keeps blindly parroting with zero understanding why.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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (2 children)

cat is for writing files, dd for writing disks.

Can you explain how this can work?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago (1 children)

No, cat is not for writing files. Cat is for reading files and directing the data to standard output.

With ">" you are directing standard output to a file, in this case a blockdevice.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

Cool, need to try that

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

/dev/sdX is a file, and both dd, cat can read files in full. You can even try something like zstd to compress it too.

One of the nice things about dd though is you can see the progress with --status=progress

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Why? I am free to use whatever I want. This is not Microsoft Windows.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago

What

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

TIL you can do that with udisksctl. How can you do that?

I usually just use dd or Ventoy.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

I thought that was what Impression uses but it doesnt tell that anymore. So I dont know

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

Raspberry pi imager is supposed to be pretty good