Making a bootable USB stick¶

You need the .iso (from the downloads page or built yourself) and a USB drive of 4GB or more — everything on it will be erased.

Two disks get erased here — pick the right ones

Writing the ISO erases the USB stick, and later the installer erases the machine's disk you install onto. Both are irreversible. Double-check the device each time. GISNIX and Kartoza accept no responsibility for lost data.

LinuxmacOSWindows

balenaEtcher (GUI, works the same on every OS) — download from balena.io/etcher, point it at the .iso and the drive, and click Flash.

dd, if you'd rather not install anything:

lsblk                          # find your USB drive's device name —
                                # NOT a partition (sdb, not sdb1)
sudo dd if=gisnix-installer.iso of=/dev/sdX bs=4M status=progress conv=fsync
sync

Triple-check /dev/sdX before running this — dd overwrites whatever device you point it at with no confirmation prompt. Writing to the wrong one destroys that disk's data.

GNOME Disks — open it, select the USB drive, menu → "Restore Disk Image…", pick the .iso.

balenaEtcher — same as above, download from balena.io/etcher.

dd, if you'd rather not install anything:

diskutil list                  # find your USB drive, e.g. /dev/disk4
diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk4
sudo dd if=gisnix-installer.iso of=/dev/rdisk4 bs=4m

Use the /dev/rdiskN (raw) device, not /dev/diskN — it's dramatically faster, and still the same disk. As with Linux, confirm the device number before running this.

Rufus — download from rufus.ie, select the .iso and the USB drive, leave the partition scheme on its default (GPT for UEFI), and click Start.

balenaEtcher works identically to the Linux/macOS instructions above if you'd rather use the same tool everywhere.

Verifying the download (optional)¶

The release also publishes a .sha256 checksum alongside the .iso. Confirm the download wasn't corrupted before writing it to a drive:

sha256sum -c gisnix-installer.iso.sha256   # Linux
shasum -a 256 -c gisnix-installer.iso.sha256   # macOS

(On Windows, CertUtil -hashfile gisnix-installer.iso SHA256 prints the hash to compare by eye against the .sha256 file's contents.)

After it's written¶

Reboot the target machine with the USB drive plugged in, and pick it from the boot menu (the key varies by manufacturer — F12, F10, Esc and Del are common). Make sure Secure Boot is off and the firmware is set to UEFI, not legacy/CSM — see the quickstart for what happens next.