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?
One of these should do what you’re looking for. Each has a slightly different approach.
+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.
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).
Thanks, I’ll check these out
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 thehello.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
Ventoy ftw
If you want a GUI, I would use Balena Etcher. You might be able to use raspberri pi imager too.
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.
That’s what I ended up going with on Fedora
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.
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
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!
I haven’t found a good GUI (Balena’s Etcher is cross platform, but the flatpak never worked for me)
dd
has never failed mesudo 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)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.
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!
Ah, “the linux community” 😌 🧘
dd
Sometimes stuff won’t chain boot from within ventoy.