How to burn an image in Ubuntu

In the unstoppable evolution that we are experiencing in computing, a lot of information that we store is stored in the cloud. The CD/DVD is still alive, but what we use the most, even to store movies and music, are hard drives, whether they are those of our computers, external or USB sticks. The price has been one of the factors that have made this transition a reality, but there are still cases in which it is useful to know how to "burn" a CD/DVD, and even more so if we come from Windows and have reached a system like Ubuntu.

What we are going to do here is explain how to burn a disc image, also known as "ISO" by its extension, on a USB stick or DVD from the Ubuntu operating system. Although what is exposed here is done in the main version, the process is valid for any official flavor of Ubuntu. Let's start.

1. Check the integrity of your image

Data corruption is a problem that particularly affects files downloaded from the Internet, and it would be a shame to waste a drive for this reason. To verify the integrity of the image that we are going to burn, we will proceed to carry out, prior to recording, a verification of it.

To carry out the verification we will show you two commands based on different digital summaries (MD5 and SHA256) whose result must match the one provided by whoever supplies the image (generally indicated on the web page from which the download is made). Although this data is not always available, it is advisable to compare it whenever possible.

Without commenting on the differences between the different digital summary algorithms, in practice we can use one or the other interchangeably, since both they will offer us sufficient security to verify correct integrity from our image file:

md5sum nombre_de_la_imagen.iso

O well:

sha256sum nombre_de_la_imagen.iso

In both cases the result obtained will be a text string Alphanumeric with the summary of the image whose value must match the one indicated. Do not worry about copying it whole, since the slightest alteration (a single bit) would make the summary obtained totally different. In this link You can check the hashes of the different images of the Ubuntu-based distributions.

2.1 Save the image to a flash drive

If, as is currently expected, you want to record the image on a pendrive that you can reuse as many times as you want, You must execute the following command that we indicate:

sudo dd if=nombre_de_la_imagen.iso of=/dev/dispositivo_pendrive

If you do not know the path of your USB memory, you can use the following command to list those disks that exist on your system:

sudo fdisk -l

Using commands in the terminal emulator will always work, but you can also use GUI tools like Whale Etcher.

2.2 Burn the image to a compact disc

Unlike ordinary data that is stored on a computer, an image file cannot be dumped directly onto a disk. It needs to be recorded by means of a special program that expands / extracts its content on a medium and makes it readable by the computer. To carry out this step we will insert a blank disk with enough capacity to contain the image data and we will click with the right button of the mouse on the file and choose the option that indicates Burn to disc ...

We recommend that you use, whenever possible, write-only discs, since they are the cheapest alternative for storing your information on this medium.