As I understand it, there isn’t really a canonical way to burn an ISO. Any tool that copies a file bit for bit to another file should be able to copy a disk image to a disk. Even shell built-ins should do the job. E.g. cat my.iso > /dev/myusbstick reads the file and puts it on the stick (which is also a file). Cat reads a file byte for byte (test by cat’ing any binary) and > redirects the output to another file, which can be a device file like a usb stick.
There’s no practical difference between those tools, besides how fast they are. E.g. dd without the block size set to >=1K is pretty slow [1], but I guess most tools select large enough I/O sizes to be nearly identical (e.g. cp).
Given that this is the crucial first step in installing Linux on a new computer, the fact that there is so much mystery and arbitrariness around it seems to me pretty revealing and symptomatic of Linux’s general inability to reach ordinary folks.
As I understand it, there isn’t really a canonical way to burn an ISO. Any tool that copies a file bit for bit to another file should be able to copy a disk image to a disk. Even shell built-ins should do the job. E.g.
cat my.iso > /dev/myusbstickreads the file and puts it on the stick (which is also a file). Cat reads a file byte for byte (test by cat’ing any binary) and>redirects the output to another file, which can be a device file like a usb stick.There’s no practical difference between those tools, besides how fast they are. E.g. dd without the block size set to >=1K is pretty slow [1], but I guess most tools select large enough I/O sizes to be nearly identical (e.g. cp).
[1] https://superuser.com/questions/234199/good-block-size-for-disk-cloning-with-diskdump-dd#234204
Given that this is the crucial first step in installing Linux on a new computer, the fact that there is so much mystery and arbitrariness around it seems to me pretty revealing and symptomatic of Linux’s general inability to reach ordinary folks.
Thanks for the information.
This isn’t mystery, they’re saying any old command that prints out or copies a file’s contents will do.
If you need to use a tool that “just works” without growing your own understanding, there’s plenty of GUI-centric bootable USB writers out there.