4 ms·

I never understood the market for Balena Etcher. You can use the standard unix 'dd' tool to copy images to sdcards and usb-drives. You can literally `dd if=wha

by sly010 5y ago

I never understood the market for Balena Etcher. You can use the standard unix 'dd' tool to copy images to sdcards and usb-drives. You can literally `dd if=whatever.iso of=/dev/rdisk3` (or whatever your disk id is). I have done it dozens of times. It doesn't give you a progress indicator, but I don't need to do this often anyway. The pro version does make sense thought, I just can't imagine a long running manufacturing process where the SDcards are arriving faster than I can write to them.

automato 5y ago
from what i can tell, the pro version is fairly hackable - you can literally write software that will sense what's plugged into it and do something with that. for example, you can plug an oscilloscope into port 1, a DMM into port 2, a 3d printer into port 3, power your circuit from port 4, and you have a "brain" that controls your entire setup as well as reads inputs from your measuring equipment, might be far-fetched, i'm just spitballing ideas here
cf100clunk 5y ago
Showing progress of dd writes using status=progress flag and/or pv command: https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-unix-dd-command-show-progress-while-coping/ https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-unix-dd-command-show-pro...
DenseComet 5y ago
I once nuked my OS partition flashing a USB drive using dd. Completely my mistake, but now I just stick to using etcher. Takes three clicks, doesn't require me to remember how to use dd, and prevents any stupid mistakes.
Barrin92 5y ago
i once messed up the disk ID and fucked my system by accidentally confusing the usb drive with a disk and since then I've just used etcher or other gui tools, simpler and safer. also what I like about etcher in particular is that it always seems to correctly identify usb drives even if some other tool has messed up the partitioning. I'm not the kind of person who can remember all the cli commands.
jabroni_salad 5y ago
If you make an open source project and support comes from your free time, etcher is a perfect tool. Take the 3DShacks community for example, the users just want to run homebrew for their bootleg games or to cheat in pokemon. They do not care about the intracies of formatting a disk or want to stand up a linux computer. Etcher is a one-button tool that just works and won't create additional work for the nice people volunteering their time as helpers in the community. Unless you are a very rare person indeed, you presumably liked that your linux computer's OS had an installer to handle all the busywork for you, because installing the OS is not a project that interests you. Personally I am a big fan of compilers that prevent me from having to mess around in machine code. All of computing is abstracting and making things easier and I do not really get why Etcher in particular always attracts these 'i dont get it' comments when this exact microsm is the basis of our entire profession.
- sly010 5y ago
  > why Etcher in particular always attracts these 'i dont get it' comments when this exact microsm is the basis of our entire profession Because if you are creating some bootable media, it's not difficult to assume you are installing something on a raspberry pi, creating some bootable disk to mess around with your or someone else computer or phone, working on an embedded device, etc, etc. Basically I assume you know what a terminal is. Maybe I am just too old, but I can't imagine downloading and installing a 430MB (just checked) GUI tool that runs one command. Your example (gamers) makes sense though, and this should be a lesson for me.
pedroma 5y ago
Let me just spend the next 15 minutes reading the man page for dd. But before that, let me figure out what a terminal is. A few minutes later... "The dd utility copies the standard input to the standard output. Input data is read and written in 512-byte blocks. If input reads are short, input from multiple reads are aggregated to form the output block. When finished, dd displays the number of complete and partial input and output blocks and truncated input records to the standard error output." Excuse me, what?
automato 5y ago
you can get progress (without any other commands installed) like this: After you start dd, open another terminal and enter either: `sudo kill -USR1 $(pgrep ^dd$)` Or, if you're on BSD or OS X: `sudo kill -INFO $(pgrep ^dd$)` https://askubuntu.com/a/215521 https://askubuntu.com/a/215521 but etcher seems to be way faster than dd for me
- selfhoster11 5y ago
  `pkill -USR1 dd` may also work
- sam_lowry_ 5y ago
  >but etcher seems to be way faster than dd for me bs=1M will help you.
selfhoster11 5y ago
There are several excellent reasons why dd is also called the "disk destroyer". I lost data once, because it was the wrong /dev/sd* in the command line, where Balena Etcher makes it harder to mistake the target devices. Besides, a progress indicator is always nice even if it doesn't speed anything up just by being present.
- selfhoster11 5y ago
  I don't understand why I'm being downvoted. Is my attitude coming across as smug? Am I being punished for being a critic of a classic Unix utility? To be clear, dd is a fantastically flexible tool, but there are tools that better and more safely serve a subset of its functionality. Right tool for the job and all that.
dogma1138 5y ago
Talk to an IT lab manager in a school how much time they might spend on flashing cards, or an SBC reseller or a business that does IOT integration… It’s not even about can you keep up with the rate manually it’s about is it cost effective, $1000 is what 50 hours at $20 per hour? That thing pays for itself in any setting.

by sly010 5y ago

automato 5y ago

from what i can tell, the pro version is fairly hackable - you can literally write software that will sense what's plugged into it and do something with that. for example, you can plug an oscilloscope into port 1, a DMM into port 2, a 3d printer into port 3, power your circuit from port 4, and you have a "brain" that controls your entire setup as well as reads inputs from your measuring equipment, might be far-fetched, i'm just spitballing ideas here

cf100clunk 5y ago

Showing progress of dd writes using status=progress flag and/or pv command: https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-unix-dd-command-show-progress-while-coping/ https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-unix-dd-command-show-pro...

DenseComet 5y ago

I once nuked my OS partition flashing a USB drive using dd. Completely my mistake, but now I just stick to using etcher. Takes three clicks, doesn't require me to remember how to use dd, and prevents any stupid mistakes.

Barrin92 5y ago

i once messed up the disk ID and fucked my system by accidentally confusing the usb drive with a disk and since then I've just used etcher or other gui tools, simpler and safer. also what I like about etcher in particular is that it always seems to correctly identify usb drives even if some other tool has messed up the partitioning. I'm not the kind of person who can remember all the cli commands.

jabroni_salad 5y ago

If you make an open source project and support comes from your free time, etcher is a perfect tool. Take the 3DShacks community for example, the users just want to run homebrew for their bootleg games or to cheat in pokemon. They do not care about the intracies of formatting a disk or want to stand up a linux computer. Etcher is a one-button tool that just works and won't create additional work for the nice people volunteering their time as helpers in the community. Unless you are a very rare person indeed, you presumably liked that your linux computer's OS had an installer to handle all the busywork for you, because installing the OS is not a project that interests you. Personally I am a big fan of compilers that prevent me from having to mess around in machine code. All of computing is abstracting and making things easier and I do not really get why Etcher in particular always attracts these 'i dont get it' comments when this exact microsm is the basis of our entire profession.

sly010 5y ago
> why Etcher in particular always attracts these 'i dont get it' comments when this exact microsm is the basis of our entire profession Because if you are creating some bootable media, it's not difficult to assume you are installing something on a raspberry pi, creating some bootable disk to mess around with your or someone else computer or phone, working on an embedded device, etc, etc. Basically I assume you know what a terminal is. Maybe I am just too old, but I can't imagine downloading and installing a 430MB (just checked) GUI tool that runs one command. Your example (gamers) makes sense though, and this should be a lesson for me.

pedroma 5y ago

Let me just spend the next 15 minutes reading the man page for dd. But before that, let me figure out what a terminal is. A few minutes later... "The dd utility copies the standard input to the standard output. Input data is read and written in 512-byte blocks. If input reads are short, input from multiple reads are aggregated to form the output block. When finished, dd displays the number of complete and partial input and output blocks and truncated input records to the standard error output." Excuse me, what?

automato 5y ago

you can get progress (without any other commands installed) like this: After you start dd, open another terminal and enter either: `sudo kill -USR1 $(pgrep ^dd$)` Or, if you're on BSD or OS X: `sudo kill -INFO $(pgrep ^dd$)` https://askubuntu.com/a/215521 https://askubuntu.com/a/215521 but etcher seems to be way faster than dd for me

selfhoster11 5y ago
`pkill -USR1 dd` may also work
sam_lowry_ 5y ago
>but etcher seems to be way faster than dd for me bs=1M will help you.

selfhoster11 5y ago

There are several excellent reasons why dd is also called the "disk destroyer". I lost data once, because it was the wrong /dev/sd* in the command line, where Balena Etcher makes it harder to mistake the target devices. Besides, a progress indicator is always nice even if it doesn't speed anything up just by being present.

selfhoster11 5y ago
I don't understand why I'm being downvoted. Is my attitude coming across as smug? Am I being punished for being a critic of a classic Unix utility? To be clear, dd is a fantastically flexible tool, but there are tools that better and more safely serve a subset of its functionality. Right tool for the job and all that.

dogma1138 5y ago

Talk to an IT lab manager in a school how much time they might spend on flashing cards, or an SBC reseller or a business that does IOT integration… It’s not even about can you keep up with the rate manually it’s about is it cost effective, $1000 is what 50 hours at $20 per hour? That thing pays for itself in any setting.