09-22-2016, 12:52 AM
(09-21-2016, 05:02 PM)kflorek46 Wrote: Etcher works nicely, is about as straightforward as programs get, and it wrote the armbian Xenial image (2G) to microSD about as quickly as anything (< 2 minutes.) The checking stage took maybe 30 seconds. I am taking their word that this is a valid 100% read check.
Etcher is horribly bloated. That's what you get when you start deploying real applications made with scripting languages. I came accross it just recently since I thought for myself: Let's write a tool for OS X that helps Armbian users burning and verifying our images. Made a list of features, did a web search for this, discovered Etcher, tested Etcher, dropped the idea to reinvent the wheel even if the Applications I'm able to create with my toolchain are usually less than 1 MB in size (and Etcher on OS X wastes +200 MB).
If you're on Linux and know what you're doing, know about SD cards, know how and why to verify your burn process... you don't need other tools than dd and cmp/md5sum (same applies to every other OS, even in Windows you can verify with winmerge or whatever tools).
The average Pine64 user is not an expert in these things (and should not be one!) and can not even imagine that he can buy counterfeit SD cards directly from Amazon, that his new SD reader starts to corrupt writes to cards after ~1 min due to overheating, that his USB front ports are prone to EMI and he constantly fails writing images using the front ports while the USB back ports would work and so on.
On Pine64 OS images also have no way to tell whether they work or not (there is not a single custom led on Pine64/Pine64+ we could use to give user feedback like 'it boots' by blinking or solid light and so on).
Users when fed with misleading instructions (that's one of the worst problems around Pine64) also get creative. They're told to use 'SD Formatter' somewhere in the forums, format their card (which is absolutely useless), copy the compressed ISO image (the .zip file) on it and try to boot. Will never work.
Most people don't like to be told 'you probably did something wrong' since it gets annoying pretty fast. But unfortunately there are a lot of possibilities to 'do something wrong' and some are not related to the user at all (a bad SD card is a bad SD card and you get those from the most trustworthy sellers since they can't prevent selling counterfeit cards as they're injected into the supply chain pretty early)
All this is long known so why not simply recommending a tool that is able to stop this mess? Even if it's somewhat bloated. Etcher's killer features are the result of a different approach (and that's what it makes really special): it is software written with the user and the task to accomplish in mind. They thought first 'what's the problem?', 'what's the steps people are failing with' and then started to code. It's an active project and listens to suggestions. If people would just start to use it...
Let's start to propagate a tool that helps those users that need some help in this stage the most (Linux experts will use their own tools anyway)