Essential System Utilities is a series of articles highlighting essential system tools. These are small utilities, useful for system administrators as well as regular users of Linux based systems.
The series examines both graphical and text based open source utilities. For details of all tools in this series, please check the table at the bottom.
This article looks at Ventoy, a versatile utility that creates a bootable USB drive for ISO (and other) files. A USB drive is formatted, and you install Ventoy once. Then you can copy ISO files to the USB drive and boot from it.
Installation
Download the compressed tarball from the project’s GitHub page. At the time of writing, the file is ventoy-1.0.27-linux.tar.gz. Extract the contents with the command:
$ tar zxvf ventoy-1.0.27-linux.tar.gz
Change into the newly created directory:
$ cd ventoy-1.0.27
Here’s a directory listing. We’re using a slightly older version.
If the USB drive has more than 1 partition, you’ll first need to delete the partition(s). Make sure there’s no data on the USB drive that you need. Use a program such as GParted. Once done, we can then run the Ventoy2Disk.sh shell script to write the program to the USB drive.
$ sudo sh Ventoy2Disk.sh -i /dev/XXX
where /dev/XXX is the USB device you’re using as the bootable USB drive. In the example below, that’s /dev/sde.
The USB drive is now divided into 2 partitions.
Next page: Page 2 – In Operation
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Installation
Page 2 – In Operation
Page 3 – Summary
Complete list of articles in this series:
| Essential System Tools | |
|---|---|
| ps_mem | Accurate reporting of software's memory consumption |
| gtop | System monitoring dashboard |
| pet | Simple command-line snippet manager |
| Alacritty | Innovative, hardware-accelerated terminal emulator |
| inxi | Command-line system information tool that's a time-saver for everyone |
| BleachBit | System cleaning software. Quick and easy way to service your computer |
| catfish | Versatile file searching software |
| journalctl | Query and display messages from the journal |
| Nmap | Network security tool that builds a "map" of the network |
| ddrescue | Data recovery tool, retrieving data from failing drives as safely as possible |
| Neofetch | System information tool written in Bash |
| Timeshift | Similar to Windows' System Restore functionality, Time Machine Tool in Mac OS |
| GParted | Resize, copy, and move partitions without data |
| Clonezilla | Partition and disk cloning software |
| fdupes | Find or delete duplicate files |
| Krusader | Advanced, twin-panel (commander-style) file manager |
| nmon | Systems administrator, tuner, and benchmark tool |
| f3 | Detect and fix counterfeit flash storage |
| QJournalctl | Graphical User Interface for systemd’s journalctl |
| QDirStat | Qt-based directory statistics |
| Firejail | Restrict the running environment of untrusted applications |
| VeraCrypt | Strong disk encryption software |
| Unison | Console and graphical file synchronization software |
| hyperfine | Command-line benchmarking tool |
| TLP | Must-have tool for anyone running Linux on a notebook |
| nnn | Portable terminal file manager that's amazingly frugal |
| Glances | Cross-platform system monitoring tool written in Python |
| CPU-X | System profiler with both a GUI and text-based |
| Ventoy | Create bootable USB drive for ISO/WIM/IMG/VHD(x)/EFI files |