Flashing An OS

When you want to be more private the most important thing is your operating system. Flashing an operating system is often not as hard as it seems, the reason that people think it is scary is that people think you will have a big chance to ruin your computer. While flashing an OS on a computer, the risk is generally very low. The bigger risk is that you make a mistake such as turning off the computer in the middle of the process.

USB or SD Card?

I prefer USB since it’s compatible with more machines, I generally only use SD cards when its a Raspberry Pi. I think both can be an option. Generally USB is also faster than SD and typically has larger storage in case you want to be booting your system from it.

Flashing Preparation

First and foremost you want to have a USB for this as we already talked about.

You will also need an ISO image, this is a file that contains the system that you want to install. You do not need to pick from the list below. I recommend things I think will be useful for my readers. If you find that another system is better for you then use that. Here is a list of sites for the operating systems that I recommend.

And last but not least, you will also need to install balenaEtcher. When you go to the website of balenaEtcher you need to press download balenaEtcher or you can scroll down till you see the download links. Obviously you have to download the software for whatever machine you have. When you downloaded and installed do the following.

  • Click on “Flash from file” then pick your ISO file.
  • Then in the same fashion select your drive.
  • Now click “Flash!”.
  • Before you do next step, make sure your drive is backed up.
  • Then if prompted that all contents on your drive will be erased, proceed to erase the drive.

Finding The Boot Menu

This can sometimes be a problem if you are flashing on someone else’s computer. I recommend looking on the internet. The boot menu is usually one of the following, ESC, F12, F11, F10, F8 and F2. I didn’t have laptops with all of these but this is what I found reading on the internet.

Booting Up And Post Boot.

Usually you will get to a window similar to the BIOS, use your arrow keys to select your USB and press enter.  You will see the system starts to boot.

With systems like Ubuntu, you boot from a live version often. Then what happens is that you get to install the system within the system. Usually this happens with a pop-up.I recommend that you first install the system on your Hard-disk Drive or SSD before you change any settings. 

After clicking to install the system usually the computer will restart and start installing. When it’s done you can then set it up which we have guides for on our website.

Privacy & Security For All!