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How to create a bootable Linux USB drive
(www.zdnet.com)
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this post was submitted on 01 May 2024
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For Linux you don't need a GUI tool, most how tos just dd the ISO onto the USB medium, e.g.
like described in the Debian FAQs
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.
By design. The longer you're Googling, the more ads they can sell.
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.
Worst timeline? Could be...
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.
If you want to create fully custom boot images the command
debootstickis pretty cool too!It's essentially a wrapper for debootstrap that creates bootable images. It can create both live and installer images.
qemu-debootstrapis 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 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).