- cross-posted to:
- privacyguides@lemmy.one
- privacy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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…
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♬ Hello
ddmy old friend
I’ve comesudowith you again ♬
Hello cat or cp or pv… Or anything else that works with files
Huh this is news to me. Wonder why dd has been the defacto standard in guides everywhere for the past 15-20+ years
… and the sign said the bytes of the distro are written to the SD card …. if they’re un-tar’d …
That’s interesting, apparently it was mentioned on github but nothing seems to have changed in the end
https://github.com/balena-io/etcher/issues/3784
Haven’t used that software in a long time but maybe there’s an opt-out somewhere during runtime? Although I don’t see why a user needs to be required to opt out of nonsense like this when just writing firmware to a USB disk.
Only ever touched balenaEtcher when some project or distro recommended it. Overall prefer Rufus for this sort of thing when working on Windows.
I’ve used Sardu on Windows for making multi-iso bootable USB sticks a long time ago in the past, but I’d admittedly never looked at their ToS or Privacy Policy. My use case was slapping some live boot antivirus scanners, data recovery tools, and one or two lightweight liveboot-Linux ISOs on one USB as a portable toolkit.
When I’m making anything else from Windows, I’ve always stuck with Rufus. Had never heard of BalenaEtcher before now.
I"m horrible with names of programs and mess with a lot of junk comps switching out OS’s and just tinkering around so I’m always using crazy utility programs. BalenaEtcher is used in a lot of tutorials or guides for installations, I think recently both Elementary OS and even Ubuntu had instructions pointing towards BalenaEtcher.
I never thought it was a great program, it was finicky to use and errors out quickly multiple times. Looking back I saw the signs, weird new program being promoted above other “well established” burn programs, ads, and now scrolling down their webpage it’s just a bunch of promotional subscription bullshit. I think I just threw up in my mouth a little bit looking at the “balenacloud” and “balenasense”, like if they’re collecting your data through etcher then all of that shit is probably compromised. Another fucking google wannabe corp.
dd
Never understood why you would use anything else. It’s in coreutils!!!
There are people coming from Windows, which does not have
dd.
J think the best solution for window$ ppl is Rufus?
Install Linux! /s
“just” setting that up takes much longer than installing a small app to do it.
OK so keep using the small app that is reporting your usage activity
Or just dont use windows
Many won’t touch the command line.
I know, but just because someone doesn’t understand something or ignores it doesn’t mean it isn’t the best/simplest choice for 90% of cases.
It’s faster to drag and drop a downloaded ISO and choose the target from a dropdown, than do it on a command line. And get a progress bar. As much as command line is usually faster, it isn’t in this case.
Yes you can also get a progress bar on the command line but it’s more typing again, and realistically you need to look the option up every time if you use dd once every 3 months.
Lmao. Uses a computer, typing is too much. It took more typing to write your comment than to craft a tab-completed dd command, even if you had to call the help menu to refresh your available options, jus’ sayin’
I get it though, the general public are scared of the big bad 'puter magic and need GUIs.
Tab complete? Just ^R that shit!
Shhh, that’s too advanced. Besides, CLI is outdated and slower than GUIs, this is just insane behavior /s
I honestly didn’t even need to specify tab-completed. It’s still less typing than their comment unless your paths are miles long.
Let me try: Lmao. Uses a computer, still does stuff the slower way because learning new things is too difficult.
To be serious, I am looking for the best solutions for my use cases, not adequate ones. Yes dd works perfectly fine and as you noted doesn’t take long to use anyway. But just because it’s fine doesn’t mean other approaches aren’t better.
A GUI tool can offer or take a list of download URLs for common distros so downloading isn’t a separate step, it can check if the target device is a flash drive and not a hard drive by mistake, it can automatically choose the optimal block size for the device, it can verify the process by reading it back from the device, can show you the current filesystem, label, and usage of the target device to confirm, it can handle flashing to multiple devices at the same time with separate and total progress bars.
If I wanted to do all that on the command line it’d be quite a lot of commands or a sizeable script to write. Or I can use a simple dd command and lose out on all of the above. Either way it’s a worse option. I will only use dd when a GUI tool isn’t installed, or when I’m on a system without a DE.
We will have to agree to disagree.
At least you came back with reasons beyond “I don’t like typing.”
ETA: > learning new things is too difficult.
I could use this argument for folks that don’t want to learn CLI as well, doesn’t really track in either direction.
Because GNU dd-rescue exists
It is indeed the best way, but somehow I am still anxious using this command, even after flashing countless USB drives 😅
I’ve made it a habit to type out the command without sudo at first, then when it yells at me about permissions I am reminded to go back and double-check.
If you need a FOSS, cross platform GUI for bootable USB sticks, Raspberry Pi Imager is a really good solution.
It is mainly used to flash SD cards for RPIs, but also you can burn any ISO on any support with it.I used to use the fedora media writer but the RPi imager software is so easy I switched
Is no one aware of Fedora Media Writer? It’s FOSS and the most trustworthy ISO burning software in existence. It’s only issue is that its named as if it is written only for producing Fedora bootable media. It works for everything.
I dunno… I just use dd.
cat works perfectly fine too 👌
Eh, I prefer being able to specify block sizes, to maximize the throughput.
Seeing progress, too
Meh i find it slow.
Or gnome disks, which also adds an “open with ‘write to drive’” option to isos and images
Sudo dd if=tails.iso of=/dev/sdb
bash: Sudo: command not found
Lol, nice one
In my early days of Linux, I royally fucked up a USB thumb drive (back when they were expensive) using
ddand as a result do not trust myself with it.I would use Hannah Montana Linux if it was the only GUI option to burn a USB ISO.
Weird. I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve used that command. But it’s probably been several thousand. And I’ve never screwed up a flash drive that way.
There has been once or twice where I’ve pulled the flash drive out too quickly after it finished writing and it actually hadn’t finished writing and had to redo it, but other than that, I’ve not actually screwed up any drives beyond repair or anything.
i still don’t understand why anyone would use etcher. it’s an electron wrapper over
dd. it’s 80MB where rufus is 1.5. when it appeared there were already other programs that did its job better.I like clicking buttons that have a text on them saying what they do instead of trying to memorize a gajillion terminal commands and flags where I have to enter more commands and flags to see what they do.
plus it’s some some sanity checks like not showing you your system drives. Or warning you when the drive you are about to nuke is suspiciously large and maybe not the usb drive you actually want to use.
This is basically the main feature. Stopping you from fatfingering the wrong drive
On Windows, Rufus is just as easy to use tho. And on Linux, there is Gnome Disks.
use rufus.
Rufus seems to be just for Windows and dd does not have a gui
that’s correct. on windows, rufus is a better tool, and on linux or mac it’s just a built-in command with a manual packed in.
also, ubuntu ships with startup image creator, and gnome disks ships as a flatpak, if those are more your speed.
Thanks for the info, I’m on linux mint and after checking these out it isn’t immediately apparent from their websites whether or how I could install them. Still think etcher occupies a niche that alternatives don’t fill, its website directs you straight to installing it, it’s cross platform, and using it is very easy, so it’s something that could reasonably be linked to in various install tutorials.
on mint you install them as packages.
Friendship ended with Balena
Now Rufus is my new best friend
Ventoy is life!
did they ever clear up that random unexplained binaries issue?
From what I could gather, they’re taken from Fedora and OpenSUSE. They’re signed blobs for secure boot support.
Real
I tried belenaEtcher once on my Mac… And it seemed to me more like a spyware than an actual software, I was a bit confused and never used it again.
Generally Ventoy is better than both. Choose a dedicated flash storage, flash Ventoy to it, then click and drag as many ISO’s as can fit on your drive and you can boot from any one of them at any time.
Much better than Etcher or Rufus, IMO.
Who tf is downvoting? Ventoy is the best
I’m guessing the people aware of Ventoy’s undocumented binary blob.
From literally the same thread: https://lemm.ee/comment/14867214
Why use a fancy GUI tool when good old
dddoes the trickfor Windows
cp command works well too
Just use
dd. It’s not that hard. You pass it 2 arguments:if=the file you want to flash, andof=the destination. If you’re feeling fancy, pass in somestatus=progress. And don’t forget to prepend it withsudo. That’s it.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=progressThe 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
Did you make sure that the
ofis correct?lsblkto make sure.If your sure it wrote to the right drive i would make sure that you have a good download. Did you run your checksums?
I think fedora works with secureboot but you might want to disable it just to see if that is the issue. I believe you can reenable it after install.
Make sure to go into the bios and boot from external drive/usb.
Out of 15 years of using
ddi have never had a problem.I did verify with
lsblk, with a listing before and after plugging in the stick to be absolutely sure.I also did verify the checksum of the ISO.
I’ll double check SecureBoot, but as I mentioned, the same ISO written to the same stick with Fedora writer did boot in the same machine it wouldn’t boot from with the
ddversion.I know it’s something I did or didn’t do to make it work correctly, so this is not me trying to dunk on
dd, just trying to understand what I did wrong.just trying to understand what I did wrong.
You might not have done anything wrong.
There is also the possibility of a bad USB drive or write memory failure. There is lots of things that could go wrong that’s not your fault. Might try a different USB or a different USB port on your machine.
You might want to try zeroing out the USB,
if=/dev/zero. Then you might need to make a new partition table. You can use something like gparted. Or https://linuxconfig.org/how-to-manipulate-partition-tables-with-fdisk-cfdisk-and-sfdisk-on-linuxYou can try GPT or DOS. I dont think it matters.
Not sure if the ISO will have the partition table so you might want make the new partition table just to be sure the stick defiantly has one. If dd overwrites it from the iso no harm no foul.
Thats all the troubleshooting steps I can think of right now.
Linux mint factory USB creator just right click and make bootable.
Yet another reason for people to run a default prompt (deny until prompt answer) firewall.
A what?
Good question. I will attempt to clarify:
OP is saying that individual should run firewalls on their machines, that block port activity by default, and only allow traffic upon an approved request by the administrator account.
An interactive firewall.
One that blocks programs from accessing the internet and prompts the first time they try until you click a button that says allow or you choose the alternative which is deny. A program like this you’d have no reason to give it internet access, it’s something whose operations should be entirely local.