Tails no longer recommending balenaEtcher

[qualifiedkitten@lemmy.world]

I used it because that's what the instructions on the Linux Mint website for creating a bootable USB stick from Windows say to do.

I have no clue what "electron wrapper", "dd", or "rufus" are. I'm trying to learn more, but can't learn it all in one day.

https://linuxmint-installation-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/burn.html#in-windows-mac-os-or-other-linux-distributions

[mwa@lemm.ee]

Meh i find it slow.

[nullpotential@lemmy.dbzer0.com]

Not using Ventoy in 2025?

[rowanthorpe@lemmy.ml]

Thanks, that's good to know, but for raw-writing a bootable image to a device do you (or anyone reading) know if there are also straightforward powershell commands for mapping devices at the block level? (as opposed to mounting at filesystem level)

[euphoma@lemmy.ml]

cp command works well too

[tja@programming.dev]

Flatpack? You are using Linux and you need "iso writers"? Is your dd broken, son?

[tja@programming.dev]

Seeing progress, too

[lime@feddit.nu]

weird that the installation guide is hosted on a separate website that hasn't been updated in eight years. that's irresponsible of them. anyway rufus is a better version of etcher that you can download for windows.

[purplemeowanon@lemmy.ml]

The article was about Windows. And, no, I'm not on Windows. i use GrapheneOS on my phone and triple-boot Arch/Debian/Fedora on my laptop. I'm just making the point that the article was about Windows so replying with UNIX commands doesn't really make sense.

[lovablesidekick@lemmy.world]

I used it less than a week ago for a Mint install, worked fine.

[wispy2891@lemmy.world]

Because of the risk of accidentally wiping the main drive if you're just copy pasting stuff

[utubas@lemm.ee]

Ventoy uses several blobs without any instructions of compiling them yourself?

[andromxda@lemmy.dbzer0.com]

Just use dd. It's not that hard. You pass it 2 arguments: if= the file you want to flash, and of= the destination. If you're feeling fancy, pass in some status=progress. And don't forget to prepend it with sudo. That's it.

[andromxda@lemmy.dbzer0.com]

If you actually read the post, you would have known, it's fine, but there are some privacy concerns with it:

“However, in 2024, the situation changed: balenaEtcher started sharing the file name of the image and the model of the USB stick with the Balena company and possibly with third parties.”

[andromxda@lemmy.dbzer0.com]

If you actually read the post, you would have known, it does work, but there are some privacy concerns with it:

“However, in 2024, the situation changed: balenaEtcher started sharing the file name of the image and the model of the USB stick with the Balena company and possibly with third parties.”

[harsh3466@lemmy.ml]

I just tried this the other day and was unable to boot from the USB. any chance you could shed some light on what i might have screwed up?

The command was:

dd if=fedora.iso of=/dev/sdc bs=4M status=progress

The USB stick was notounted and the fedora image was verified. The command completed successfully but I couldn't boot from it. When I used fedora writer to burn the same image to the same USB stick it booted no problem.

[friend_of_satan@lemmy.world]

Dang, nice! I've been using dd for nearly 30 years and have never seen that. I actually used to used dcfldd because it had better progress reporting than dd (and supported repeated patterns for input). Thanks for sharing!

[boxoffeet@lemmy.world]

Wow, I was not aware of that. I really liked balena. Thankfully, I haven't been using it since installing Mint.

[lovablesidekick@lemmy.world]

I seriously DGAF who knows which Mint edition I installed or the brand of flash drive I used.

[lornosaj@lemmy.world]

This sounded like a techy Ron Swanson.