If you want to install Linux on a desktop, you'll first have to create a bootable USB drive with your distribution of choice.
  • Gormadt@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    2·
    5 months ago

    Personally I use Ventoy

    Basically I can just throw a whole bunch of ISOs on a USB drive and when I boot it it brings me to a menu to pick which one I want to boot

    It’s freaking great

    I’ve got various windows ISOs and Linux distros just living on a 64GB flash drive

    • billwashere@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      5 months ago

      Yeah totally go with Ventoy. I had an external device that basically did the same thing but it was a pain in the ass. Little screen and you pick an iso on the drive and it simulated a CD rom. Ventoy is so much simpler. My only complaint is there isn’t an installer that works on a Mac so I have to use Windows. But other than that it’s awesome.

    • penquin@lemm.ee
      1·
      5 months ago

      Ventoy is great. It was a bit confusing when I first ran into it. It installed, but I didn’t know what happened. Lmao. I think I installed it like 10 times because it wasn’t telling me what it did, but then the light bulb went off. Aaaaaah. I was trying to install windows on a laptop and it was being a bitch on the USB stick, and Ventoy made it work.

  • azvasKvklenko@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    1·
    5 months ago

    Unetbootin in 2024? Jeez, just use Belena Etcher for single ISO, or dd if you are already on Linux (it should work on Mac as well) or Ventoy for simply folder of your bootable isos

  • the_crotch@sh.itjust.works
    1·
    5 months ago

    Unetbootin huh? Something tells me people capable of running a Linux-only application know how to make a Linux installer USB.

  • rotopenguin@infosec.pubEnglish
    0·
    5 months ago

    I would like to install a distro on a USB stick, without it doing something stupid to my internal drive’s EFI.

    • Anarchistcowboy@lemmy.world
      0·
      5 months ago

      I see people say this a lot and I have no experience with this but I wonder why you wouldn’t use a USB nvme SSD enclosure it seems a lot easier and idk if running it over USB would limit the speed but it could preform better than a USB stick.

      • rotopenguin@infosec.pubEnglish
        1·
        5 months ago

        A dumb little stick is fine for the occasional “fix something up” or “take a snapshot of a Windows drive because dd is objectively better than anything that Windows itself could do”. A live iso distro precludes me from adding a handful of other useful tools.

        Late breaking edit : What I ended up doing was formatting a stick as small EFI / 5GB btrfs / rest exfat. Chattr +c the btrfs, and debootstrap in there. Put rEFInd on the efi and tell its conf file about the stick (or maybe it’ll detect). Put non-free-firmware & stable-security into apt’s sources.list. In a chroot shell, apt get live-task-non-free-firmware-pc gdm3 systemd-timesyncd linux-image-amd64 locales gnome-terminal. Add other tools to suit taste. Fix up the fstab, make /tmp tmpfs, make the exfat mount nofail. With btrfs compression, I can have a gnome environment inside of 2.5GB. It would be even more smol if I could figure out booting directly into Weston.

  • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    06·
    5 months ago

    Any “How To” that doesn’t just use Rufus isn’t worth the page its text is rendered on. Rufus can do Linux boot disks, but is indispensable for Windows boot disk utilities. It’s one of the only ways I know of to make a Windows ToGo installation (equivalent of a Linux Live USB), which I used to install Windows on a friends SD card for their Steam Deck so they can dual-boot.

    https://rufus.ie/en/

    If you’re looking to make a Linux boot USB from Linux itself, BalenaEtcher is probably a better bet since Rufus is Windows-only.

    https://github.com/balena-io/etcher

    I’ve noticed there’s tons of how-to’s for making a bootable disk on Windows, hardly any for Linux. Perhaps we ought to remedy that?