Boot Your Raspberry Pi from a USB: A Tutorial

Boot Your Raspberry Pi from a USB: A Tutorial

Default behavior for a Raspberry Pi is to boot from the micro SD card. However, this behavior can be changed via the Raspberry Pi imager tool, where we can change the boot order for the device. This allows us to configure our Raspberry Pi to prioritize booting from USB before micro SD card. If the USB port contains nothing bootable, then it will resort to the micro SD card. In this tutorial, you will see how to boot a Raspberry Pi from USB.

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How to disable Plymouth on Linux

Plymouth is an application originally developed by Red Hat and later adopted basically by all the most commonly used Linux distributions. The software runs very early in the boot process, and provides eye-candy animations which accompany the user until he is prompted to login into the system. When Plymouth is used, boot messages are hidden, although they can be visualized simply by clicking the esc key. Some users, however, may prefer to visualize boot messages by default, and avoid any animation.

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How to force fsck to check filesystem after system reboot on Linux

How to force fsck to check filesystem after system reboot on Linux

Checking the file system for errors is an important part of Linux system administration. It is a good troubleshooting step to perform when encountering bad performance on read and write times, or file system errors. In this tutorial, we will explain a procedure on how to force fsck to perform a file system check on the next system reboot or force file system check for any desired number of system reboots, whether it is the root or a non-root mount point.

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How to unlock a LUKS volume on boot on Raspberry Pi OS

LUKS (Linux Unified Key Setup) is the de facto standard encryption method used on Linux-based operating systems. As we saw in previous tutorials, when we want a partition or raw disk encrypted using LUKS to be automatically unlocked at boot, we need to enter a dedicated line into the /etc/crypttab file. Doing so, we are prompted to provide the encryption password interactively. This is quite straightforward on laptop or desktop machines, but how can we unlock a volume on an headless server? One solution is to use dropbear to get ssh access at an early boot stage, in the initramfs, in order to provide the volume password.

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How to mount a Samba shared directory at boot

Samba is a free and open source interoperability suite of programs which allows us to share files and printers between machines running Linux or Windows. A Samba share is pretty easy to configure and can easily  be accessed on clients, since the vast majority of Linux file explorers has built-in support samba. In certain situations, however, we may want to mount a Samba share at boot, just like a normal filesystem on a specified mountpoint.

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Adding Windows 10 to GRUB boot menu

Booting a MS Windows OS using GRUB

Configuring a computer as dual boot system is a popular solution for users that wish to use Linux and Microsoft Windows on the same device. However, getting the two operating systems to share the same computer can be a bit tricky. In particular, Windows has its own boot loader and Linux uses GRUB. It’s easiest to have a dual boot system when GRUB is used as the boot loader, as it can be easily configured to boot into Windows as well as Linux.

In this guide, we’ll go through the step by step instructions to add Windows 10 to the GRUB menu. This way, you can select between Windows and your installed Linux distro when the computer first boots up. This guide assumes that you’ve already installed Linux and Windows on the same computer, and simply need to add Windows as an option to your GRUB menu.

In this tutorial you will learn:

  • How to add Windows to GRUB boot menu

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Writing Fedora ISO file to bootable USB key

How to create a Fedora Linux Live bootable USB key

A great feature of many Linux distributions is that you can create a live USB (or CD/DVD) key and boot directly into it. This allows you to try out an operating system, troubleshoot an existing installation, or install Linux onto the system’s hard drive.

Fedora is one of those distributions of Linux that allows us to boot into a usable environment directly from USB. In order to do that, we just need to write the Fedora installation file (.ISO format) to the USB thumb drive.

In this guide, we’ll go over the step by step instructions to create a Fedora bootable USB key via either command line or GUI. Follow along with us to get your USB key setup through Fedora’s Media Writer tool or the ddrescue command utility.

In this tutorial you will learn:

  • How to download Fedora and Fedora Media Writer
  • How to create Fedora bootable USB with Media Writer (GUI method)
  • How to create Fedora bootable USB with ddrescue (command line method)

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