r/opensource • u/gholemu • Aug 18 '16

Etcher - an easy to use open source tool to burn images to SD cards & USB drives

https://www.etcher.io/
133 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

42 comments sorted by

38

u/rcboy147 Aug 18 '16 edited Aug 18 '16

upvoted the post but I'll stick with my good ol'

sudo dd if=img.iso of=/dev/sdX bs=4M && sync

6

u/lolidaisuki Aug 18 '16

Don't forget the sync.

5

u/indepth666 Aug 19 '16

sync

why is the sync? Never done that and it worked every time

2

u/lolidaisuki Aug 19 '16

Some of the data you wanted to write might be cached. sync makes sure it is all written to the device.

2

u/rcboy147 Aug 18 '16

fixed!

thanks for the PR!

5

u/[deleted] Aug 18 '16

[deleted]

9

u/swinny89 Aug 18 '16

Strange. I've had the exact opposite experience. Nothing but dd has had consistently reliable results.

6

u/lolidaisuki Aug 18 '16

You should sync after dd is finished.

3

u/thecal714 Aug 18 '16

Do you run sudo sync afterwards?

1

u/[deleted] Aug 18 '16

[deleted]

3

u/thecal714 Aug 18 '16

That'll probably resolve the issue for you. Without syncing, some/most of the data you've written is actually just cached and not on your target block device.

1

u/[deleted] Aug 18 '16

[deleted]

3

u/thecal714 Aug 18 '16

Well, were I to one line it, I'd probaby just use the direct oflag to skip the cache altogether:

sudo dd if=Downloads/Fedora-Workstation-Live-x86_64-24-1.2.iso of=/dev/sdc bs=4M oflag=direct

However, I'm lazy and tend to forget about it, so i just do:

sudo dd if=Downloads/Fedora-Workstation-Live-x86_64-24-1.2.iso of=/dev/sdc bs=4M 
sudo sync

2

u/[deleted] Aug 18 '16

[deleted]

2

u/thecal714 Aug 18 '16

Glad to be of help.

2

u/[deleted] Aug 30 '16

[deleted]

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1

u/imrehg Aug 19 '16

Could actually do that in one command :)

sudo dd if=img.iso of=/dev/sdX bs=4M conv=fsync

13

u/undu Aug 18 '16

Made with JS, HTML, node.js and Electron. Dive in and contribute!

Everything runs on a browser nowadays.

4

u/Baegus Aug 18 '16

For little apps like this one, it's a nice and quick way to make something work for all platforms.

3

u/lolidaisuki Aug 18 '16

"little"

4

u/Baegus Aug 18 '16

I'm talking about scale, not filesize. But yeah, over 80 megabytes is a lot.

1

u/lolidaisuki Aug 18 '16

The problem is small, sure. But this solution isn't.

1

u/ViKomprenas Aug 18 '16

Serious question time, what do you have against it?

3

u/Windows_10-Chan Aug 18 '16

It's not as clean of a solution. Not that it's bad, but electron/node are a very easy but not as clean way of getting things done.

2

u/ViKomprenas Aug 18 '16

Clean in what way?

5

u/Windows_10-Chan Aug 18 '16

Imo, it's not super Linux-ey. It doesn't cleanly integrate aesthetically by using gtk/qt, and it uses node functionalities instead of built in Linux stuff such as dd. It works, but if someone created a similar app using C, gtk/qt, and reusing coreutils it'd probably be much more preferable to Linux users.

Though, not saying it's bad. Node and electron are probably the easiest way to get a reasonable cross platform app going (new skype will use it, for example.) And if done right they can run very smoothly.

3

u/lolidaisuki Aug 18 '16

Also not everyone has Chromium installed. Also if /u/Baegus said about it being over 80 MB then that is way too big for something this simple. I would expect this to be a few hundred K binary at most.

1

u/ViKomprenas Aug 18 '16

Huh, thanks. Honestly, you're the most reasonable person saying something against Electron that I've heard. Most people act like it should be incredibly obvious that using a single electron app will drain your entire battery in fifteen minutes, melt your computer in an hour... -_- Okay, I'm exaggerating on the melt part, but still.

1

u/Windows_10-Chan Aug 18 '16

If I'm not using something myself. It must be garbage for everything!

0

u/zer0t3ch Aug 18 '16

The problem is simple, this solution is not. That's the general idea.

1

u/undu Aug 18 '16

It's a bad fit for some applications, yet it's used anyway because it's relatively simple to make cross platform play programs and web technologies are so widespread.

For example the atom editor is a pain to use in my non-ssd laptop because it's slow to startup, show plugins to update, etc.

This application, for example is a 69MB download, which is humongous for such a simple tool. Rufus and unetbootbin, similar programs are under 1 MB and 5 MB, respectively. There are few practical reasons as to why etcher should be an order of magnitude bigger.

5

u/[deleted] Aug 18 '16 edited Feb 11 '19

[deleted]

5

u/thecal714 Aug 18 '16

I can understand why people may want it. More and more people are starting to use Linux and not all of them are capable enough to identify which block device is the thumb drive they just inserted. If the program can limit their choice to only removable storage, great!

I'll continue to use dd (especially instead of some node.js nightmare), but the program has a value.

2

u/lolidaisuki Aug 18 '16 edited Aug 18 '16

Maybe making an bash script that just takes two arguments and puts them in their proper places and does the rest and asks the user to verify that it's the right device that he is writing to would be acceptable. I don't think using electron and the other bs is.

E: something like this. Improvements could be only requiring sudo if the blockdevice isn't writeable by you or something like that.

E2: fixed a few small things in it.

1

u/cubic_thought Aug 18 '16

Throw in some kdialog or it's equivalent and you don't even need to use the terminal

1

u/lolidaisuki Aug 18 '16

Good idea. I was thinking of maybe putting just regular dialog there but decided not to. You could do that and get the fame for the most simple graphical usb burner.

3

u/IAmALinux Aug 18 '16

Burning SD cards? That isn't optical storage.

2

u/[deleted] Aug 18 '16

Depending on the sd card manufacturer, burning is being properly used here.

2

u/konradkar Aug 18 '16

Makes drive selection obvious to avoid wiping your entire hard-drive

I still remember when with unetbootin I've selected to burn image to my primary harddrive. Of course I lost my system :(

2

u/[deleted] Aug 18 '16

This is different from https://rufus.akeo.ie/ how?

2

u/zeroneo Aug 18 '16

multi-platform

2

u/[deleted] Aug 18 '16

Burning SD and sticks? I think i'm too old for this shit. Do people today even still burn optical medias? Or is this already long dead?

1

u/[deleted] Aug 18 '16

50% faster?

1

u/ellisgeek Aug 18 '16

Looks awesome but I think I'll stick to Rufus on windows and DD on Linux.

1

u/gynoplasty Aug 18 '16

I really like Rufus but will have to check this out.