dd - useful flags

For burning a hybrid media image to a USB stick

dd if=debian-10.1-amd64.iso of=/dev/sdb obs=4M status=progress oflag=sync

The critical things here:

/dev/sdb is wherever your USB stick is recognised.

obs=4M - 4M rather than 512k chunks written to the stick [output block size

status=progress gives you some idea of how far through you are

oflag=sync - syncs to force data caches to flush - the OS reports back impossibly fast transfers and it then takes minutes to actually write the data.

Now that USB sticks can be metal cased and there's no obvious indication of activity, this helps a lot.

Detect virtualisation in use

systemd-detect-virt

 will tell you whether the underlying virtualisation is kvm, lxc or whatever

New blog for Linux scripts and bits for fun

This is a small blog - from the same person as flosslinuxblog for snippets / one liners / commands I found useful and for differences between Debian and Red Hat derived distributions and commands

Install kvm with UEFI bios [Debian]

The non-free package you need is OVMF - which packages Intel's Tianocore UEFI implementation - and installs to /usr/share/ovmf/OVMF

Call it with something like the following

qemu-system-x86_64 -m 1024 -bios /usr/share/ovmf/OVMF.fd -hda /var/lib/libvirt/images/[image filename] -cdrom [path to iso image]

Building a .iso image from the command line [Debian]

mkisofs was the original solution: if you have files in a directory that need to be burned to a CD ( the example uses cd_dir and cd.iso as the output file name]

genisoimage -o cd.iso -R -J  cd_dir

[Includes Rock Ridge and Joliet extensions]