Optical drives are rapidly disappearing from our computers of all kinds, and consequently installing operating systems from USB flash disks is becoming increasingly popular. ISO images of the ROSA distribution were originally intended for burning to DVD disks, but they can as well be written to flash disks which would allow you to boot from them and launch the Live system or start installation. There is no standard tool for writing images to flash disks, everybody uses what he or she likes. In ROSA the command line tool dd was traditionally recommended for performing this kind of job. However, it can hardly be called user-friendly, and most users would feel at least some discomfort, if not terror, using it. For Windows users the situation is even worse. Granted, there is a dd port for Windows, but it happened to have serious bugs which prevent the resultant flash disks from working properly. All this led to the solution of developing our own tool, ROSA Image Writer.

RosaImageWriter-window-eng.png

The first version was based on the Windows version of SUSE Studio Image Writer, but its C# language (and, naturally, requirement for .NET Framework), usage of two completely unrelated projects in two different frameworks for Windows and Linux versions, and some other drawbacks made us write the new tool from scratch. Now ROSA Image Writer is developed in C++ with Qt5 framework and supports both Windows and Linux from the same codebase.

The list of main functions is:

Download links are available on the description page: