Using dd or another third party flashing tool usually requires root to flash to usb.
Hope you find an answer, it would also be great to see the context of why you need to do it without root.
this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2024
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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.
That makes sense, it's good to be weary. Root access is needed for higher privilege tasks and flashing an image to a USB is one of them, best practice is to use sudo so that you are only using root for the actions you need it for, whilst still being logged in as a normal user.
You would get a UAC check in Windows trying to flash an image to a USB, which is elevating your privilege temporarily to administrator.
If you are just starting out with Linux then have fun, the most rewarding part is figuring stuff out like this so you know for next time!
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.
those still require root, they just don't explicitly say so. They still pop up with a password prompt
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.
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.
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.
Last commit over a year ago.
No thank you.
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.
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.