9mo ago

When putting Debian.iso onto a flash drive do you have to use root?

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?

19 comments

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.
- 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.
- 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.
  https://github.com/ventoy/Ventoy/issues/2795
  https://lemmy.ml/post/20404494
  
  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?
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.
- Truthfully just am not an experienced enough user to understand all the potential risks of having it enabled although I'm figuring out now that pretty much every distro I've used until now had root by using sudo.
You could write it using your phone with https://f-droid.org/packages/eu.depau.etchdroid/
What's the concern?
I reckon it could be related to the permissions required to write to the usb. Perhaps udev rules could help here?
I did it on a humble user account using GNOME disks. Select the USB stick and choose restore image in the menu at the top right.
Do you not have root access or are you worried about using root access? Sudo will do the trick, you don't need to login as root directly.
Just download the Balena watcher app image, flash whatever is you want, and then delete it. It's ridiculously easy.
- don't use balenaetcher, it's a terrible piece of software. use unetbootin or usbimager.
It is possible to format removable drives without root access through udisks2, e.g with gnome-disks or KDE ISO image writer. GNOME Impression is another tool that should work.
- They show no password prompt for the user with the "active" session for removable drives. Only system drives always require admin auth for formatting and partitioning. Maybe your session setup is not completely correct so your user session is not marked as the active session or you tried it with a drive that is considered a system drive.

19 comments