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…

  • BoxOfFeet@lemmy.world
    0·
    1 year ago

    Wow, I was not aware of that. I really liked balena. Thankfully, I haven’t been using it since installing Mint.

  • Andromxda 🇺🇦🇵🇸🇹🇼@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    0·
    1 year 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
      0·
      1 year 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

        • gnuhaut@lemmy.ml
          0·
          1 year 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
            0·
            1 year 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
              0·
              1 year 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.

      • Maiq@lemy.lol
        0·
        1 year ago

        Did you make sure that the of is correct? lsblk to 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 dd i have never had a problem.

        • harsh3466@lemmy.ml
          0·
          1 year ago

          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 dd version.

          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.

      • dev_null@lemmy.ml
        0·
        1 year ago

        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.

        • madame_gaymes@programming.devdeleted by creatorEnglish
          0·
          1 year ago

          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.

          • dev_null@lemmy.ml
            0·
            1 year ago

            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.

            • madame_gaymes@programming.devdeleted by creatorEnglish
              0·
              1 year ago

              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.

        • madame_gaymes@programming.devdeleted by creatorEnglish
          0·
          1 year ago

          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.

    • Firnin@feddit.org
      0·
      1 year ago

      It is indeed the best way, but somehow I am still anxious using this command, even after flashing countless USB drives 😅

      • memphis@sopuli.xyz
        0·
        1 year ago

        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.

    • Andromxda 🇺🇦🇵🇸🇹🇼@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      0·
      1 year ago

      If you actually read the post, you would have known, it does work, but there are some privacy concerns with it:

      “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.”

  • Orygin@sh.itjust.works
    0·
    1 year ago

    I mean for privacy things it makes sense to avoid leaking anything. But I fail to understand where the danger is to have anonymous data that says a user installed “Ubuntu-24.04-wappity-whatever.iso” to “KINGSTON DATA TRAVELER 32GB” at some point.

    • major_jellyfish@lemmy.caEnglish
      0·
      1 year ago

      If anything that seems like worthwhile analytics for the dev team to have access to.

      Most software lets you opt out of sending anonymous analytics data though.

      • interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml
        0·
        1 year ago

        They could just ask. “Please allow us to know what you flash and on what device so we can improve the software” yes, no, tell me more, show me the data

        • Petter1@lemm.ee
          0·
          1 year ago

          Then I would have no problem using the SW, transparency is important to me

    • Petter1@lemm.ee
      0·
      1 year ago

      It is a trap for people not knowing and government may use it as excuse to activate executive

  • kepix@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    have they tried also tracking for errors, cause it fucks up every second image unlike rufus

    • utubas@lemm.ee
      0·
      1 year ago

      Ventoy uses several blobs without any instructions of compiling them yourself?

  • xttweaponttx@sh.itjust.works
    0·
    1 year ago

    Balenaetcher has, for me at least, failed to write to USBs for the last 3 years or so that I’ve tried to use it - meanwhile random iso writers from flatpak have been more reliable for me. Very obnoxious that so many iso related sites recommend it. Rufus, kicks tons of ass, if for whatever reason you’re still on windows.

    Also on most distros I’ve tried, the disk utility has some sort of right click or context menu that gets you a ‘restore disk image’ button that works great as well.

      • xttweaponttx@sh.itjust.works
        0·
        1 year ago

        😂 I also read this as Ron’s voice!

        Nah as much as i love doing stuff via terminal, I am extra paranoid specifically about writing to the wrong device and losing data; I prefer as many confirmations as possible that I’m writing to the correct drive, and graphical installers tend to give me just a few more reassurances. A few examples would be stuff like

        • a graphical representation of partitions (the general layout of a drive tends to offer an easy ‘fingerprint’ in my mind; like the pattern of partitions help me confirm I’m looking at, say, a Debian install USB compared to a single-partition general purpose storage disk)
        • icons for different types of devices, like an SD card, USB, or hard disk icon
        • confirmation dialogues summarizing what device is targeted, and what all will be performed

        I’m also the kind of person who stares at a written email worrying about every last nuance of my phrasing, so 🤷‍♂️😂 definitely a me problem, I think!

  • Atlas_@lemmy.world
    0·
    1 year ago

    Rufus is great! I worked with the maintainer to fix a bug in hardware they didn’t have and it was a very pleasant experience.