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?

    • Ghoelian@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      22
      ·
      7 months ago

      +1 for ventoy. With that you can just flash ventoy on it once, then copy iso’s over to the usb drive without reformatting or reflashing anything.

      • bigmclargehuge@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        6
        ·
        7 months ago

        I’ve had issues with Ventoy on multiple computers with multiple isos. +1 for convenience, -1 for not working 3/4 of the time (for me, I’m sure there are numerous factors).

  • Nibodhika@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    7
    ·
    7 months ago

    Personally I have a USB drive with Ventou and have been using that for a long time.

    But before that I just did a dd. Although I seem to remember someone doing a benchmark and realizing that piping the file was faster. Here’s what I mean by that:

    In bash you have the echo command which prints text:

    echo "Hello"
    

    Will print Hello.

    In bash you can send the output of a command to a file, so:

    echo "Hello" > hello.txt
    

    Will write Hello in the hello.txt file.

    In bash you can use the cat command to read files:

    cat hello.txt
    

    Will print the Hello we wrote in that file earlier.

    In Linux drives are files, so if your USB drive is in /dev/sdb (DON’T JUST BLINDLY COPY THIS) you can create an image of it like so:

    cat /dev/sdb > usb.iso
    

    But also the devices are writable, so you can flash an image to a disk by doing it the other way around:

    cat image.iso > /dev/sdb 
    
  • owenfromcanada@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    7 months ago

    They obviously don’t have the features that Rufus has, but I’ve ended up using the default USB image writers that come pre-installed (found them on both Mint and Manjaro, probably available on others). If you’re just looking to write an ISO, check to see if you already have one.

  • psion1369@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    7 months ago

    My honest recommendation is dd It works, it does it’s job, and doesn’t need to many bells and whistles. My only complaint is that there isn’t an easy way to show progress. But as a background command, it works.

  • tombruzzo@lemm.eeOP
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    7 months ago

    Thanks everyone. I tried ventoy but it didn’t work straight away. I do like the idea of having a list of isos to pick from, but it might take more tweaking to get right.

    I went with the boot loading tool in Fedora since I just wanted to flash mint to do a reinstall on my kids’ laptop

  • foremanguy@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    7 months ago

    The principal alternative to Rufus is Balena etchter, but for me it works 1/5 times. But now I’m using Ventoy and… Just use it, it damn fucking good!

  • BaumGeist@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    7 months ago

    I haven’t found a good GUI (Balena’s Etcher is cross platform, but the flatpak never worked for me)

    dd has never failed me

    sudo dd if=<path to ISO file> of=<path to USB> bs=4M status=progress conv=fsync

    (double, triple and quadruple check that the output file, of=, is the correct device with multiple different commands before running this)

  • Corgana@startrek.website
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    7 months ago

    Balena Etcher is what you want, though AFAIK if you’re making a Windows installer no Linux programs have the convenient options to disable TPM and online account etc that make Rufus so nice.

  • scratchandgame@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    Tiếng Việt
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    7 months ago

    What have you used that’s worked well? Or, could I run Rufus on my linux machine with WINE?

    A BLOODY STUPID IDEA!

    Using Wine is just stupid enough.

    dd is safe. I have used Balena’s Etcher 2 years ago but it seems the drive isn’t bootable in UEFI mode!