Unetbootin in 2024? Jeez, just use Belena Etcher for single ISO, or dd if you are already on Linux (it should work on Mac as well) or Ventoy for simply folder of your bootable isos
I kept seeing so many different ones recommended and I kept getting weird issues I didn't understand with most of them. I don't often need to make a bootable Linux USB, but every time, Rufus did the job quick and easy.
I see people say this a lot and I have no experience with this but I wonder why you wouldn't use a USB nvme SSD enclosure it seems a lot easier and idk if running it over USB would limit the speed but it could preform better than a USB stick.
A dumb little stick is fine for the occasional "fix something up" or "take a snapshot of a Windows drive because dd is objectively better than anything that Windows itself could do". A live iso distro precludes me from adding a handful of other useful tools.
Isn't it cool that you only need to use the terminal when you really need it? Simple tasks as flashing an usb stick shouldnt require knowledge of the terminal.
And that's why It's great to have choice. Also, if you start off in CLI, it can be quite overwhelming. The first time I had to partition my drive I was super scared not to mess it up. A few months later I knew exactly what I was doing.... when I was using a graphical installer or Gparted. Earlier today, I partitioned my drive using cfdisk (fdisk feels kinda painful; press this, then this, and if, like me, you don't know the commands by heart, it can take too long), and I installed Arch manually cuz I was bored. It was my first time doing a manual install with systemd-boot (always did grub in the past), so I didn't realise I had to write my own boot entries for all 3 kernels (mainline, zen and lts), and because of font issues, I just switched back to Fedora (going up a version from 39 to 40 in the process) where I had an issue with a qt component that meant my sddm theme was not working. It isn't the theme's fault, that's for sure, as it worked perfectly on Fedora 39 and elsewhere, and because pretty much all themes I could find relied on this qt module (it's qtgraphicaleffects, packaged as qt5-qtgraphicaleffects on Fedora) , I got a bit angry and then sat down and rewrote the theme, removing any dependency on graphicaleffects (was only used for drop shadows in some popups), though for some reason some of the colours also got a bit funky but it works and it works well (I also had to hide one of the popups but it wasn't an essential one).
But I digress. Point is, if it's more comfortable for you, you'll use it. If it isn't but you want it to be, then to ill force yourself to use and get better. If you don't, you just won't. That's the power of choice in Linux.
For example, when you want to install desktop environments, you need to use CLI. There’s no GUI option. I guess that’s why Linux is considered “difficult” for Windows/MacOS users, while they can use Chromebook, which is also Linux.
The point of original post is how zdnet is trying to let people use Linux, right?
It must have gotten better than the last time I tried to use Ventoy. Maybe 5 years ago? It kept complaining that the USB drive I was using was bad when it worked completely fine with other tools.
Ventoy is great. It was a bit confusing when I first ran into it. It installed, but I didn't know what happened. Lmao. I think I installed it like 10 times because it wasn't telling me what it did, but then the light bulb went off. Aaaaaah.
I was trying to install windows on a laptop and it was being a bitch on the USB stick, and Ventoy made it work.
Yeah totally go with Ventoy. I had an external device that basically did the same thing but it was a pain in the ass. Little screen and you pick an iso on the drive and it simulated a CD rom. Ventoy is so much simpler. My only complaint is there isn’t an installer that works on a Mac so I have to use Windows. But other than that it’s awesome.
I will say, as someone who has been looking for a simple way to install Linux on my Windows desktop at home, this is incredibly useful. Doubly so as I'm not very experienced with installing OS's and Linux can look very intimidating to an outsider looking in!
Ugh I switched to Arch full time 5 years ago and I had to walk to the servers uphill both ways in the snow. Kids today don't know how good they have it.
This works because block devices like /dev/sdX are just files. If you cp a file onto another file, it overwrites the data of the destination with the source. A block device represents the device itself, not the filesystem; if you wanted to put the ISO inside the filesystem, you'd have to mount it first.
Not technically. unetbootin and some similar tools like rufus take the USB, partition it, and copy the contents of the disk to it after manually setting up a bootloader on it. This is not required for most Linux ISOs though where you can just cp or dd the image directly to the USB as they are already setup with all that on the image. But other ISOs, like I believe Windows ones have a filesystem on them that is not vfat so cannot be directly copied. Although these days for windows you just need to format the USB as vfat and copy the contents of the windows ISO (aka the files inside it, not the iso filesystem) to the filesystem.
I tend to find unetbootin and rufus break more ISOs then they actually help with though. Personally I find ventoy is the better approach overall, just copy the ISO as a file to the USB filesystem (and you can copy multiple ones as well).
Any "How To" that doesn't just use Rufus isn't worth the page its text is rendered on. Rufus can do Linux boot disks, but is indispensable for Windows boot disk utilities. It's one of the only ways I know of to make a Windows ToGo installation (equivalent of a Linux Live USB), which I used to install Windows on a friends SD card for their Steam Deck so they can dual-boot.
Man, Google really does suck now. It feels nearly impossible to get something like a how-to deep in the Debian FAQs to come up, as it mostly surfaces this auto-generated SEO crap for How To's.
Very cool, I'd assumed there was a simple command line set of commands, just was failing to find it. Thanks.
Man, Google really does suck now. It feels nearly impossible to get something like a how-to deep in the Debian FAQs to come up, as it mostly surfaces this auto-generated SEO crap
By design. The longer you're Googling, the more ads they can sell.
...Ben Gomes – a long-tenured googler who helped define the company during its best years – lost a fight with Prabhakar Raghavan, a computer scientist turned manager whose tactic for increasing the number of search queries (and thus the number of ads the company could show to searchers) was to decrease the quality of search. That way, searchers would have to spend more time on Google before they found what they were looking for.
I don't remember where, but i read that this method only works because linux distributors "abuse" the ISO format to allow this. If I remember right, it's not possible to use this ISOs on regular disks
Of course the command you provided is right and it's what I use, it's just a fun fact
Yes and no, it's the other way round. The ISOs often are hybrid images which you can burn onto a CD/DVD or dd onto a USB pen drive. Until approximately 10-15 years ago, if I remember correctly, the distributed Linux ISOs where standard not hybrid images, thus you always needed some other program to create bootable USB media.
qrmu-debootstrap is also super useful if you want to customize and image for a different architecture (for example building custom RPi images).
Super useful information, thanks!
EDIT: Is this anything like the isorespinner.sh? I've previously used that to get Linux on an RCA Cambio W101 because it needed a fancy ISO since it has a 32-bit bootloader and a 64-bit CPU.
I tried Windows ToGo on a few USB keys (including two high-speed ones), never managed to get something I could actually use that was not laggy AF, to the point it's not usable (dozens of minutes to boot, lags of entire minutes and so on). Did I do something wrong?
Security is not a binary variable, but managed in terms of risk. Update your stuff, don't expose it to the open Internet if it doesn't need it, and so on. If it's a server, it should probably have unattended upgrades.
If it's a server, it should probably have unattended upgrades.
Interesting opinion, I've always heard that unattended upgrades were a terrible option for servers because it might randomly break your system or reboot when an important service is running.
There are two schools of thought here. The "never risk anything that could potentially break something" school and the "make stuff robust enough that it will deal with broken states". Usually the former doesn't work so well once something actually breaks.
Both my Debian 12 servers run with unattended upgrades. I've never had anything break from the changes in packages, I think. I tend to use docker and on one even lxc containers (proxmox), but the lxc containers also have unattended upgrades running.
Do you just update your stuff manually or do you not update at all? I'm subscribed to the Debian security mailing list, and they frequently find something that means people should upgrade, recently something with the glibc.
Debian especially is focused on being very stable, so updating should never break anything that wasn't broken before. Sometimes docker containers don't like to restart so they refuse, but then I did something stupid.
I used to check the cockpit web interface every once in a while, but I've tried to enable unattended updates today. It doesn't actually seem to work, but I planned on switching to Nix anyway.
I don't use Cockpit, I just followed the Debian wiki guide to enabling unattended upgrades. As fast as I remember you have to apt install something and change a few lines in the config file.
It's also good to have SMTP set up, so your server will notify you when something happens, you can configure what exactly.
Just because it has a CVE number doesn't mean it's exploitable. Of the 800 CVEs, which ones are in the KEV catalogue? What are the attack vectors? What mitigations are available?
The idea that it is somehow possible to determine that for each and every bug is a crazy fantasy by the people who don't like to update to the latest version.
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