Episode: 3974
Title: HPR3974: About USBimager - part 2/2
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3974/hpr3974.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 18:10:41

---

This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3974 for Thursday the 26th of October 2023.
Today's show is entitled About USB Immigra Part 2 of 2.
It is hosted by Ray Toe and is about 16 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is why you should be using USB Immigra 2 in introduction.
You are listening to a show from the Reserve Q. We are airing it now because we had free
slots that were not filled.
This is a community project that needs listeners to contribute shows in order to survive.
Please consider recording a show for Hacker Public Radio.
Hi, this is your host, Ray Toe.
And this is Part 2 about USB Immigra recorded on 28 July 23.
The headings I will talk about today, the usage of USB Immigra and the download and installation.
This is the second and last part of USB Immigra.
So let's get started.
Before I talk about it, I would like to read to you the preface of the PDF written by
sorry I bought you your name now, Baldusty Zoltan Thomas.
So I felt an niche in a simple to use multi-platform application that can write a compressed
disk dump image to a USB device.
There are existing solutions, but they are either single platform, mostly windows only,
or incredibly bloated, and some have been found to spying on its users.
Autoswork perfectly, but invoked from command line, which makes them unsuitable for average
users.
So I have decided to create the simplest GUI application possible that does write images
to devices.
Because many OS images are distributed in compressed format, it makes sense for such an application
to be able to decompress on the fly, to save storage space and users time.
Although it wasn't originally planned, but due to pressure from users, I have added
backup capability as well.
What this application wasn't designed to do and never will do, is downloading images
from the internet.
First, USB image is capable of writing any image to disks, and it would be impossible
to list all available options.
Second, those options are changing all the time.
New versions appear and some become discontinued.
There is no way to keep such a list always up to date.
And finally, I wanted the application to work without any internet connection, to eliminate
even the possibility of telemetry.
For the user interface, I have decided to use the native interface on all platforms.
This made the development a bit harder, but has many benefits from the user's point of
view.
These guarantees that the application can be distributed as a single portable executable,
as it has no library dependencies.
It also guarantees that the application is small in size, on each platform, except for
the version that embedded new unifond to those are larger.
The final result of this development, including the source and pre-compiled binaries for several
platforms, can be obtained on this GitLab website, you find the link in the show notes.
This application is open source and free software, and comes without any warranty in the
hope that it will be useful.
End of the preface.
So as I said before, the PDF comes with, well, preface begins at page 5, and it ends
on page 16 with reporting box, what's really nice thing.
Yeah, so about the GUI of USB Imature, it is a really simple design.
So to say, you have your possibility to choose the file, of course, where it is on your
hard disk.
You can, well, at least in KDE, I can drag and drop it from Dolphin, from the file manager
onto this line, and it will take over.
Then you have two buttons, one is to write and one is to read.
The next option is where you can choose where to write it to.
So the software is developed in the way that it should never take your operating system
drive, so that you will not kill your operating system.
When it has two tick boxes, one is the one I already mentioned in the part 1, this is
the verification, this is ticked by default, leave it, it's really important.
The second one is to compress the image, I guess this is the backup case he mentioned,
and the third button is an option where you can choose, I think it is about the chunks
it writes to disk, it is one mega, two mega, four mega, eight mega.
You have to read that by yourself, I played once with it, but I didn't, well, it works
if you leave it on one, it just works perfectly, it is fast, so why should I care about it?
So it is really simple interface, it can be understood by anybody, so much about that.
Then there is not only the graphical user interface, you can also run it in your terminal
or command line, and if you want to do that, I suggest to you to call the man page for
USB image, I do right now as you can hear it in the background, and yeah, it's maybe one
and one and a half A4 pages, sorry guys in America, so it is in letter size, it's probably,
well, a little bit more, one, three, four of a letter size, it's not really large, comes
with different options, possibilities, if it is the first time you're using it, it maybe
makes sense to have a look at it, then what else, yeah, now you're probably aware of it
if you use what is that called parted, I think it is called parted on the GTK applications,
and on KDE, it is something with partitions, partition editor or such, usually when you
start a partition editor that will write to or make some changes on the hard disk, you
have to add or you have to enter your password, your pseudo or your root password, same here,
if you start USB image, you will have to enter your password.
Now, there is the possibility that you add yourself to the, as a user, to the disk group,
I think, disk, DISK, and if you do that, it will be no longer necessary to enter the password
when you want to burn or flash an image on your whatever drive.
So I will list some, some little stuff that is helpful while doing so, and also a part
of the code, however, it is as far as I remember, it's where I got it from, there is a description
in the PDF, how you can add this in Linux so that you don't need to enter the password.
So I started with, well, it's always interesting, as who you are locked into your system,
so you can type who or who am I, and it will return your login names, name, you can type
ID, it's a bit more details than that, then you could type groups, which will list all
the groups available on your system, or to be, or to find what you're looking for for
DISK, you can use, not recommend that I will list there, I will not read it out here,
and then you know whether your user is, and you know your user name, and you know whether
it is already on DISK added or not, well, if it is, it should not be necessary to enter
the password anyway.
So usually it is not, so you want to add your user to the group DISK so that you don't
have to do that in the future, that is done with the function you user mod, the one word,
and this one of course I will put in the show notes as well, where you would have to,
you would have to do that with sudo, with super user, or root access, and add your login
name to the command, you see there, and finally when you've done that you can check it, and it should
be working, if it doesn't working, do a log out, log in, I hope that should be it.
Let's talk about the download and the installation, yeah, not very interesting, I guess,
but still good to know. If you go on the GitLab website on the landing page, so to say of
USB image, you may find your preferred pre-built binary, if not, then I recommend you this link,
that you find in the show notes. Now if you are on the landing page and you scroll a little bit
down, you will see that there is a table with three columns, one is platform, one is front end,
so the GUI, so too, and then there is a description for what is meant by it, so there is,
I just mentioned the platforms, windows, macOS, Ubuntu, I guess, there is Debian as well,
Raspberry OS, ArchMengero, and Linux PC in general, and then there is a Raspberry Pi again.
I see one is with another disk support, the one that I read before, but if you go for Linux PC,
you will then see some with X11, some without X11, but they are basically all zip files,
and if you look on the Ubuntu, you can see that there are the depth files, and well, it depends
what you're looking for, just right now I realized there is no RPM, it is not of interest for me as I'm
a Linux user with depth, so anyway, if you don't, you will also find some screenshots here on
the landing page, and for the installation of the zip file, it has a three step how to do that,
seems to be pretty easy, also for the depth package, for the Debian package, how you do the
pseudo DPKJ, DPKG minus I like installation, WSPE immature, and that's it. So there is also a comparison
table between ballena etcher, windisk immature, and WSPE immature, so you can see how much time
they need their size, and stuff like that, yeah, and much more, but I think if I remember correctly
in the past, it was a little bit doubled what is in the PDF, and on the landing page.
Now, if you're a bit puzzled about the listing of all the different versions, you can go on the
other link that I have, where it is the three binaries, as it says in Gidlab, that you find all
versions again listed, and a little bit different with every creation like X86, AARG64, AMD64,
ARMHF, so things like that, maybe it's more helpful for you to find it, just in case, so, yeah,
now, the really nice one. So I'm talking about the size of WSPE immature version 1.09,
and this is the Debian package, it comes, or it is delivered with 169
kilobytes, and if you extract it, it will have 293 kilobytes, so this application runs under 300
kilobytes, just for comparison, the calculator software of KDE needs drumroll,
430 kilobytes, so this is plus 46%, so the calculator needs 46% more space on your hard disk than
USB immature. Well, now, I hope I convinced you to give it a try, or at least to go on the show notes,
and have a look at the links, and give it the program at a chance, as you heard before the preface,
it shouldn't be a resource hog, it does one thing, and it does it well, and I hope so it does for you.
So this was the second part of my introduction of WSPE immature, if you like, leave a comment, or send me
a message, have a nice one!
On the Sadois status, today's show is released under Creative Commons,
Attribution, 4.0 International License
