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 could never get Ventoy to work. From Windows ISO’s to several versions of Linux, it never got detected as a bootable drive. YMMV
I like the idea, but it would be great if it was more compatible with different setups.
Your machine is UEFI, which means your usb stick must be formatted in gpt. Ventoy defaults to mbr which means lagacy bios. It is just 3 mouse click setup.
Try again. Because it is the best method. I just updated 2,5 years old Ventoy stick without any issues without re-formatting.
I’ve found some thumb drives don’t like to boot.
Ventoy has worked for almost everything. Proxmox doesn’t like it.
Popsicle from Pop!_OS is also very good - really simple. I’m not sure if it can create a bootable Windows USB though.
https://github.com/pop-os/popsicle
Fedora Media Writer is also another good option.
https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora/latest/preparing-boot-media/
From this list, only Unetbootin can create Windows installation disk. For this, there is also WoeUSB but it’s CLI only.
What?
Rufus just flashes ISOs to disks. On Linux you can doo that with
- udisksctl or dd
- Impression
- Fedora Media Writer
- KDE Iso Image writer
- Balena Etcher
But you are talking about something completely different and Ventoy does that.
using dd for that is outdated info that everyone keeps blindly parroting with zero understanding why. cat is simpler and works fine.
note: both cat and dd only work for this when the image is made in a compatible way, my linux isos always work fine but a windows iso didnt and needs a more specific tool.
TIL you can do that with udisksctl. How can you do that?
I usually just use dd or Ventoy.
Ventoy ftw
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
If you want a GUI, I would use Balena Etcher. You might be able to use raspberri pi imager too.
