Etcher is a free tool for flashing microSD card with the operating system images for Raspberry Pi single board computers. The user interface of Etcher is simple and it is really easy to use. It is a must have tool if you’re working with a Raspberry Pi project. I highly recommend it.

Etcher is available for Windows, macOS and Linux. So you get the same user experience no matter which operating system you’re using.

In this article, I will show you how to install and use Etcher on Linux. I will be using Debian 9 Stretch for the demonstration. But this article should work on any other Debian based Linux distributions such as Ubuntu without any modification. With slight modification, it should work on other Linux distributions as well. So, let’s get started.

Downloading Etcher for Linux:

You can download Etcher from the Official Website of Etcher. First, go to the official website of Etcher at etcher.net and you should see the following page. You can click on the download link as marked in the screenshot below to download Etcher for Linux but it may not work all the time. It did not work for me.

[b]Installing Etcher on Linux:
[/b]Now that you have downloaded Etcher for Linux, you are ready to install Etcher on Linux. In order to run Etcher on Linux, you need to have zenity or Xdialog or kdialog package installed on your desired Linux distribution.

On Ubuntu, Debian, Linux Mint and other Debian based Linux distributions, it is a lot easier to install zenity as zenity is available in the official package repository of these Linux distributions. As I am using Debian 9 Stretch for the demonstration, I will cover Debian based distributions here only.

The Etcher settings panel is very clear and easy to use. All you have to do is either check or uncheck the things you want and click on the Back button. Normally you don’t have to do anything here. The default settings are good. But if you uncheck Validate write on success, it will save you a lot of time.

NOTE: You can also flash multiple USB devices or microSD cards at the same time with Etcher. Just select the ones that you want to flash from the list and click on Continue.

Because this option will check if everything is written on the microSD cards or USB storage devices correctly. That puts a lot of stress on your microSD cards or USB devices and takes a lot of time to complete. Unless you have a faulty microSD card or USB storage device, unchecking this option would do you no harm. It’s up to you to decide what you want.

Flash an SD or USB

For anyone who needs to flash operating system images frequently Etcher provides a reliable solution, which is easy to use and available for all computer platforms. .

A pleasing, visual user-interface greets you whenever you run Etcher because flashing SD cards and USB drives doesn’t have to be an eyesore. Selecting an image is easy, and once you’ve done that it’s only a simple drive selection away from being flashed to that drive.

Validated flashing means you’ll no longer write images onto a corrupted card and have to sit at your computer questioning why it’s not booting up.

Etcher is hard drive friendly, meaning you’ll no longer have to worry about accidentally wiping the wrong hard drive. Like this making a bootable drive becomes easy.