Linux

47231 readers

773 users here now

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

Rules

Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
No misinformation
No NSFW content
No hate speech, bigotry, etc

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

179

How to create a bootable Linux USB drive (www.zdnet.com)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

81 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 30 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (3 children)

For Linux you don't need a GUI tool, most how tos just dd the ISO onto the USB medium, e.g.

sudo dd if=<file> of=<device> bs=16M status=progress oflag=sync

like described in the Debian FAQs

[–] [email protected] 22 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Oh I know, I posted Zitron's article here on Lemmy myself just the other day lmao. Part of why it's on my mind.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago

Worst timeline? Could be...

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

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.

[–] wildbus8979 5 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

If you want to create fully custom boot images the command debootstick is pretty cool too!

It's essentially a wrapper for debootstrap that creates bootable images. It can create both live and installer images.

qemu-debootstrap is also super useful if you want to customize and image for a different architecture (for example building custom RPi images).

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] wildbus8979 3 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

I believe the script you are talking about repackages an existing iso. Debootstick builds one from scratch by pulling all the necessary packages from the repository.

For the underlying process of creating this image it uses debootstrap which is the standard Debian way of creating a full system installation (minus the whole bootloader and iso shenanigans). Debootstick allows most options from debootstrap (aka selecting a distro, release, mirror, extra packages, etc).