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?
Raw disk access is a privilege in Linux, usually reserved for root.
You could have root change the permissions on the directory to allow another user or group write 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.
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:
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.
Copying the whole image onto the device file will rewrite the partition table, boot flags and all.
But yes, usually this requires root equivalent capabilities.
