Re: [Tails-testers] USB installation instructions for Linux

> what about doing this:
> in the place where say (essentially) "install the gnome-disk-utility
> package", add a note to say something like "if your version of Linux
> lacks this package, go to the expert Linux installation doc" (i.e.
> the command line one).

That sounds good. I think what tripped me up was the possibility just wasn't covered.
> > > Of course, upstream offers Linux binaries, but I'd rather not
> > > suggest that to Linux users, for many reasons:

...

>
> Those who don't know enough to be wary are precisely the one I don't
> want to give bad habits by teaching them dangerous practices from our
> privileged position of somewhat trusted people.
Those are all compelling reasons. I was thinking of relatively inexperienced Linux users from a usability perspective, and not the "message", but you are quite right that is important. However, it is worth pointing out there are non-technical users everywhere. In Ubuntu and so on, they *predominate*.
>
>
> Another way to improve the initial installation of Tails from these
> Linux distros, both from a UX and security perspective, would be to
> package GNOME Disks, or request the distro maintainers to package
> it :)
Good point, I'll have to have a word with Pat about that one day when he's in a good mood.

>
> Maybe there's another tool that does it, and is packaged in most
> distros? I mean, all we're looking for here is a GUI frontend over
> dd/cat… but perhaps I'm asking too much.
Actually, this seems to be a harder problem than it looks. A good GUI should offer robust sanity checks and cope well with dodgy devices and boot sectors. For a while Unetbootin seemed to do quite well but would still sometimes fail. And the feeling is perhaps that any serious Linux user should be able to use the perfectly adequate command line tools.

Etcher is the best I've seen but then I would normally use dd.

>
> Cheers!
>
Cheers and thanks again for doing this!
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> intrigeri