How do I create and start a Live Medium? - How do I create and start a Live Medium? - TUXEDO Computers

You usually receive operating systems such as TUXEDO OS and other Linux distributions in the form of an ISO image, which you must write to a USB stick or CD/DVD in order to start the computer from the new boot medium and install the operating system. In this guide, we explain how you can write the ISO image with different applications and methods to a USB stick.

Preparations

You will need an empty USB stick or a stick that can be formatted without hesitation. A size of four GB is usually sufficient for TUXEDO OS, Ubuntu and many other distributions.

Download the image file (.iso) of the desired Linux distribution, e.g. TUXEDO OS or Ubuntu, from the provider’s website. As a rule, the images are not packed in archives. If they are, unpack the file first.

You will then need a computer with Linux, Windows or macOS installed from which you can run the image file on your USB stick. Simply copying the ISO file to the USB stick will not work. Instead, you must “burn” the image to the USB stick.

Create live stick under TUXEDO OS

Graphical: TUXEDO WebFAI Creator

The easiest way to provide a USB stick with an ISO image for installation on a hard disk is via our in-house tool TUXEDO WebFAI Creator.

The latest version allows you to write a bootable ISO image of TUXEDO OS or any other distribution to a USB stick. The small tool, which is mainly used to create a WebFAI stick, is already pre-installed with TUXEDO OS and can be called up via the menu or the console.

To create such a boot stick with TUXEDO OS, select TUXEDO OS Image in the second line of the app window. Click on Select target to select the USB stick to which the image is to be written.

Then click on Flash to start the process, which is completed after a few minutes.

If you want to write the image of a distribution apart from TUXEDO OS to the stick, you must first download it to your computer. Then click on More options | Flash from file in the tool interface and select the image in your file system. Then select the stick and start the flashing process in the same way as for TUXEDO OS.

Further information about the TUXEDO WebFAI Creator can be found in our knowledge base in the article TUXEDO WebFAI Creator 2.0 now for Linux and Windows

Graphical: KDE ISO Image Writer

In TUXEDO OS, you will find a tool for writing hard disc images to USB sticks in the main menu under System >> ISO Image Writer. The programme automatically recognises USB storage media connected to the computer so that you do not accidentally write the image to the system partition or another important data storage device.

You can use the ISO Image Writer under TUXEDO OS to write ISO images

Graphically: Drives (GNOME Disks)

The GTK application GNOME Disks also cuts a fine figure under Plasma, as there are hardly any dependencies to install. You install the package with the command sudo apt install gnome-disk-utility, it is called with disks. This allows you to transfer an ISO image to a USB stick in just a few steps.

Disks can do much more though. Among other things, it can format, encrypt and securely erase data carriers and measure their read and write speed. However, our focus here is on creating a bootable USB stick.

Make USB stick bootable with GNOME discs

After you have started Discs, select the USB stick on the left that is to receive the image.

Then click on the menu with the three dots at the top right and select Restore drive image, select the image to be written to the stick and click on Start restore.

After confirming again that you have selected the correct drive and the obligatory password prompt, you can track the job with a progress bar. Creating the image with disks is comparatively slow and takes around ten minutes with TUXEDO OS.

Create live stick under Linux, Windows or macOS

An alternative is the popular free programme balenaEtcher. It is available for all common operating systems and can be downloaded in different versions for your platform from the homepage of the project. Installation instructions can also be found there. It should be borne in mind that Etcher is an Elektron application and takes up over 200 MB of space on the disc just to write an image. If it is purely for Linux, the USBImager or Impression are better alternatives and only a few KBytes in size. Impression version 3.0 can now also download a selection of distributions before "burning".

BalenaEtcher is available for Linux, macOS and Windows.

Create stick with Balena Etcher

First select the image (the downloaded ISO file), then the USB stick plugged into the computer. Attention: The stick will be completely formatted, after that only the data of the live system will be on the stick. Please make sure that you have selected the correct USB stick and not a hard drive partition. Click on Flash! to create the stick.

Note: Please also refer to our Instructions for devices with NVIDIA graphics cards.

Terminal: Works under any Linux

The classic way is to use the dd command in the terminal to write ISO images. The device ID of the USB memory stick (in this example /dev/sdb) is determined using the lsblk command. In the example, we extend the display to include the output of the label. This usually makes it easier to determine the correct device ID.

lsblk -o NAME,SIZE,MOUNTPOINT,LABEL
sudo dd if=/path/to/example.iso of=/dev/sdb status=progress bs=4M
sync

If required, you can add the status=progress option to the dd command. This will give you a constantly updated progress display in the terminal while the ISO image is being written. The final sync ensures that all cache memory is written to the data carriers so that you can safely remove the USB stick from the computer.

How do I start my image created in this way?

The live stick created in this way can then be started instead of the installed system. On most TUXEDO notebooks, the best way to do this is via the boot menu — depending on the device, you will need to press ESC, F7 or F12 during the boot process. In the boot menu, you select the USB stick for booting instead of the usually preset hard disc installation.