TINY usb burner project found!

[PDP-8]

In keeping with the TC philosophy, I was excited to see this very very tiny and simple usb image burner, which is currently supported and in active development.

The bzt "usbimager" on GitLab

https://gitlab.com/bztsrc/usbimager

If you miss Core2USB, you'll love this.  The fact that a verification step after burn is on by default immediately caught my eye.

The instructions of how to use it, and also comprehensive down-to-earth instructions on how to compile it (if you want to rather than rely on the supplied binaries), for a variety of architectures and o/s, was similarly gratifying.

But, like all simplified "dd'ers", it does what is told in the iso archive itself.  Hence, at this current time, it will NOT make a bootable uefi-only stick.  But it will work very well on more conventional systems, or those that have legacy/csm features in bios turned on.  For that, you'll want to burn a custom stick with directions included elsewhere on the forum.

So far I really like it.  Tested with CorePure64 11.1 on my legacy/csm boxes and bingo - a read-only filesystem that you can garner additional tools to perform custom setups to go much further if you like.  Or use as-is with external data devices, following the normal rules of how to use read-only live-usb's.  You get the picture.

[Greg Erskine]

hi PDP-8,

I have been happy using USBImager for burning piCore(Player) SD cards since February. I was even lucky enough to get a few features added to make my conversion to USBImager permanent.

In case you missed it, here is the development thread:

https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=63&t=265251

I am hoping for a command line interface one day.

regards
Greg

[PDP-8]

Yeah, the dev, BZT really impresses me in abiding by the KISS / Unix way. He gets it.

On the Gitlab project page, I liked how he handled pressure from users who wanted to turn a <200kb utility into some all-singing-dancing monster with auto downloads, md5/sha5 checking, multibooting and all that.

I wonder if he even knows about *core's, or uses one in secret?  Seems like he'd be an ideal user.

One thing I'd like to see is a warning to *casual* users who try to do the reverse, and make an iso out of a device - they'll quickly fill up their existing filesystem with bits if they don't have enough space.

I'm of a like mind with him - we can dd party all day long (and my penchant for chiding users not using the unix syntax, but instead using the 1960's JCL syntax using IF= and OF= pairs instead of <> redirection), but admire his desire to whip up a little dd burner behind a gui for those who aren't yet that advanced.

It's a cool util, and wish him the best for something that could turn a kids life around.

[gadget42]

was reviewing our bookmarks and stumbled across one to this post

went to the project webpage and read through the first page(then saw that there were nine more...argh)

looks like the OP locked the thread after around 1.5yr/227 comments(last post 20210730)

sharing is caring

[Greg Erskine]

The Raspberry Pi forum automatically lock inactive threads.