[SOLVED] Replacement for k3b

Well xorriso is in, looks excellent, but has no gui. xfburn is in (with libburn & libisofs) and has the gui. I'll play with that now.

Growisofs, cdrecord & cdrao, are also there which is overkill. As soon as I know I won't need it, cdrecord, and k3b & friends can go. Cdrecord because I dislike it's author and he appears to dislike his users, certainly his linux ones; k3b because it's a pleasure to uninstall anything kde or gnome related

Great choice, I use it too..

I don't mind K3B but then I like KDE. What I don't like is that Unetbootin is a raggedy app yet one of the very few "burners" that can create a bootable USB Thumbdrive from an iso on Linux. I truly do not get it why this isn't already de rigeur with optical drives rapidly approaching obsolescence. Actually it's beginning to look like optical is "Dead Man Walking". Why hasn't K3B, or anyone, made this trivial?

Originally Posted by enorbet I don't mind K3B but then I like KDE. What I don't like is that Unetbootin is a raggedy app yet one of the very few "burners" that can create a bootable USB Thumbdrive from an iso on Linux. I truly do not get it why this isn't already de rigeur with optical drives rapidly approaching obsolescence. Actually it's beginning to look like optical is "Dead Man Walking". Why hasn't K3B, or anyone, made this trivial?

I usually just use dd for that.

Re: Burning bootable iso to bootable USB

Originally Posted by montagdude I usually just use dd for that.

I'm aware of the power and usefulness of "dd" but I also recognize that it is quite rare, or has been, to need to use it. As a result I can forget some options which slows me down by having to go back and load the man page to make sure I'm doing it right. I find this particularly troublesome while things are in transition as so many fundamentals presently are, a few specific to image copying is GPT vs/ MBR and UEFI vs/ BIOS. For these and a handful of other reasons I prefer a GUI where I can see all options as checkboxes or menu dialogues. It just seems faster given my intermittent use and level of caution with programs as powerful as "dd".

dd does it this way, presuming your drive is /dev/sdx

dd if=disk.img of=/dev/sdx

The importand thing is not to put it on sdx1, as the BIOS is booting the first sector and reading through. If you try on sdx1, the boot pukes on the partition table.

Slackware does a nice arrangement where you can use whatever space remains. I made a live cd with three partitions giving /,swap, & home (I think) but it also booted from the BIOS. I think the download is still updated. My usb key was only 8g, but it had all the basics.

cp file.iso /dev/sdx

My very latest computer build has no optical drive, surprising how little I miss it...

Not only have I had issues with some services (GParted, for one) creating GPT when I didn't tell it to, I also rather often alter isos and while I am familiar with "dd" I know of no way "dd" will inform me if the iso will actually still create a bootable system. Iso Master does a nice job of checking boot-ability but it doesn't burn images to anything. I think an app that reports on the boot sector, checks for duplication, follows symlinks, etc. as well as reliably burns to USB would be very sweet. I love CLI... I boot to CLI not GUI, but I also know that some jobs are better handled by GUI and deep actions involving partitioning is one of those, at least for me. I was absolutely gleeful when Partition Magic took over from Fdisk in DOS.

Don't forget to run "sync" after writing the images with "dd".