Today I was going to install Fedora 41 to take a look at the status. I downloaded the ISO and followed the link to the mediawriter download. I was quite surprised one cannot download the mediawriter – it can only be installed – which means one has to have an installation in order to use mediawriter. For those of us who run another distro and want to keep a clean install that is a non-starter for Fedora. Please give us mediawriter in a zip we can control/install if we choose.
Thanks.
You should be able to use dd to copy the iso to the usb drive.
sudo dd if=~/Downloads/linux.iso of=/dev/sdb bs=4M
Male sure you wait for the kernel to flush all its buffers to the usb before you unplug it.
Doesn’t the ISO have to be unpacked before you can install? Isn’t that the point of Mediawriter – unpacking the ISO so that it is a live thumb drive? Using the dd command is the same as drag and drop the ISO with no unpacking. ??
It doesn’t have to be unpacked. That said, I think Media Writer does reconfigure things a bit so that persistent storage will work.
It looks like there is a flatpak create-usb command. Maybe that is what you are looking for?
Copies the specified apps and/or runtimes REFs onto the removable media mounted at MOUNT-PATH, along with all the dependencies and metadata needed for installing them. This is one way of transferring flatpaks between computers that doesn’t require an Internet connection. After using this command, the USB drive can be connected to another computer which already has the relevant remote(s) configured, and Flatpak will install or update from the drive offline.
Edit: Seeing Barry’s reply below, I now understand what you mean by “unpacking”. The ISO is a file system image. Essentially, the unpacking happens when the file system is mounted. The PC’s firmware will mount (“unpack”) the file system and execute the bootx64.efi program in the image to start the installer if the file system image(s) are written to the USB drive at the block level. (Drag and drop does not write to the device at the block level.)
You want the ISO file system on the USB by writing its contents over any existing file system on the USB.
If you drag and drop then you do not setup the boot blocks at the start of the drive.
You will have a non-bootable backup of the ISO image, just a file in a folder.
Thanks. Seems to be working…
I understand you would like to have the option to run Fedora Media Writer on a Linux system without installing it, in order to keep the existing OS clean.
While this option is apparently not available, as you have noticed, please note that Fedora’s Media Writer is the project’s way of easing the creation of a bootable media with one of the available Fedora editions/spins. The Flatpak packaging of the tool also means the host OS remains pretty much clean and secured (maybe more so than running a downloaded executable).
There are, however, other third-party tools out there which are used to create bootable USBs, such as balenaEtcher, which can be run without installation.
You can also have a look at this Fedora HowTo, which outlines several methods of creating an installation image.