Tails - Replacing balenaEtcher with Rufus as installer for Windows
tails.net

I am shocked by this - the quote in below is very concerning:

“However, in 2024, the situation changed: balenaEtcher started sharing the file name of the image and the model of the USB stick with the Balena company and possibly with third parties.”

Can’t see myself using this software anymore…

  • Andromxda 🇺🇦🇵🇸🇹🇼@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    121·
    3 months ago

    Just use dd. It’s not that hard. You pass it 2 arguments: if= the file you want to flash, and of= the destination. If you’re feeling fancy, pass in some status=progress. And don’t forget to prepend it with sudo. That’s it.

    • harsh3466@lemmy.ml
      5·
      3 months ago

      I just tried this the other day and was unable to boot from the USB. Any chance you could shed some light on what I might have screwed up?

      The command was:

      dd if=fedora.iso of=/dev/sdc bs=4M status=progress

      The USB stick was not mounted and the fedora image was verified. The command completed successfully but I couldn’t boot from it. When I used fedora writer to burn the same image to the same USB stick it booted no problem.

      Edit: spelling & capitalization

        • gnuhaut@lemmy.ml
          1·
          3 months ago

          I don’t think oflags=direct has any influence on the result. Apparently that’s about disabling the page cache in the kernel, which can avoid a situation in which the system slows down due to buildup yet-to-write pages.

          • massacre@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            3 months ago

            Perhaps not. But the flag allows for direct I/O for data, bypassing buffers which can be overrun with certain size blocks, potentially causing dirty buffer depending on the machine being used. My understanding is that it’s “more reliable” for writing (especially on shitty USB Flash drives) and getting the exact ISO properly written.

            But it could be useless all the same - I’m just pointing out that OPs command is not the one recommended by Fedora when writing their ISO. Also OP is less likely to pull the drive before buffers have flushed this way.

            • gnuhaut@lemmy.ml
              2·
              3 months ago

              Oh yeah that’s where I was getting at, but I didn’t have time to write that out earlier. I agree that OP probably pulled out the usb stick before buffers were flushed. I imagine that direct I/O would mitigate this problem a lot because presumably whatever buffers still exist (there would some hardware buffers and I think Linux kernel I/O buffers) will be minimal compared to the potentially large amount of dirty pages one might accumulate using normal cached writes. So I imagine those buffers would be empty very shortly (less than one second maybe?) after dd finishes, whereas I’ve seen regular dd finish tens of seconds before my usb stick stopped blinking it’s LED. Still if you wait for that long the result will be the same.