On Debian's website it is saying to write the image to the USB stick I should use a bash script "# cp Debian.iso /dev/sdX
sync"
Is there another way to do this without using root access?
You can’t make a usb bootable without root access iirc. If you already have a bootable usb like ventoy then you can load any goofy thing you want into it without root access and it’ll work.
Please don't continue to recommend Ventoy. It has serious and unanswered security questions hanging over it, and the developer seems to be completely AWOL.
https://github.com/ventoy/Ventoy/issues/2795
https://lemmy.ml/post/20404494
I wasn’t completely convinced by that since I build it from source and the binary blobs match their checksums. Months between releases isn’t out of the ordinary for some projects too…
Regardless, what is an alternative that works the same way?
The binary blobs match which checksums? The ones provided by the ventoy developer?
GLIM is an alternative that's much simpler (it just uses Grub configs) so it is easy to audit:
https://github.com/thias/glim
Yeah when you build from source you gotta dl some blobs from busybox and some other projects. It works fine with the ones the developer claims their build is based off of, the ones whose checksums are listed in the docs and match what you get when you ask for them from the repos for the aforementioned busybox or whatever.
I haven’t pulled apart a binary release of ventoy to check and see if it actually has those documented blobs or something else.
I’ll look at glim. Might be cool.
This sounds like it only boots Linux ISOs? I kinda need the ability to boot all kinds of images, only some of them Linux based.
Using dd or another third party flashing tool usually requires root to flash to usb.
Hope you find an answer, it would also be great to see the context of why you need to do it without root.
Truthfully just am not an experienced enough user to understand all the potential risks of having it enabled although I'm figuring out now that pretty much every distro I've used until now had root by using sudo.
That makes sense, it's good to be weary. Root access is needed for higher privilege tasks and flashing an image to a USB is one of them, best practice is to use sudo so that you are only using root for the actions you need it for, whilst still being logged in as a normal user.
You would get a UAC check in Windows trying to flash an image to a USB, which is elevating your privilege temporarily to administrator.
If you are just starting out with Linux then have fun, the most rewarding part is figuring stuff out like this so you know for next time!
Just download the Balena watcher app image, flash whatever is you want, and then delete it. It's ridiculously easy.
don't use balenaetcher, it's a terrible piece of software. use unetbootin or usbimager.
I did it on a humble user account using GNOME disks. Select the USB stick and choose restore image in the menu at the top right.
