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How do I ‘Boot to USB’? (Or CD/DVD, if Such is Available)

In order to install Linux, you need to be able to boot to USB (or CD/DVD – with USB being more common these days and many devices not even having CD/DVD drives). The goal of this article is to help you boot to USB or to optical media, so that you can install or repair your Linux system.

To install Linux you pretty much have to boot to USB or to a CD or DVD. It’s true, you can actually install directly from your regular disk drive, but that’s a convoluted method that few people will ever need. I may cover that method at some point, but today is not that day!

You may also need to boot to a live Linux instance for other reasons. Maybe you need to repair your installation? Perhaps you need to grow your partition because you have run out of room? Or, just maybe, you need to recover your data so that you can do a fresh installation – or so that you can start the recovery from your backed up data?

It’d be rather pointless to enumerate the many reasons why you’d want to boot to USB. There are many reasons and it’s a skill you’re going to need. Trust me, you need to know this stuff.

I say USB because that’s the most common today, but you may also need to boot to CD or DVD. Your hardware may actually be so old that it won’t even let you boot to USB. So, for the sake of this article, let’s just assume you’re booting to some form of external media, be it USB, optical media, or even an SD card. No matter what you’re trying to boot as an alternative media, the process is pretty much the same.

Booting to USB

Booting to USB, what’s the purpose? The purpose is to install or repair an already running system. It means booting to something other than your default internal drive (under normal configurations) and using that booted media to effect change on your system.

As I said above, there are many reasons why you’d want to do this. It’s a pretty common thing, especially among Linux users. There are many questions asked about this process and I’ve decided to document the methods here.

However, there’s no way I can possibly make this article truly definitive. In fact, I’d appreciate it if you’d help. In the comments section, fill in the blanks for me. You have hardware that I may not have access to, so you can tell us what works for your hardware and the article will be a more complete source of information. It’s your time to shine!

How to Boot to USB

In order to boot to USB, you have to have fairly good timing – or a willingness to sit there and pound on the same key over and over again. In a traditional sense, you’re aiming for a boot selection menu that you can access after POST (Power On Self-Test) and that split-second before the OS starts its boot sequence.

You’re not trying to access the BIOS, you’re trying to access the boot selection menu and there’s a narrow window to get it right. The good news is that the key to access the BIOS is different than the key to access the alternative boot menu. So, a good working strategy is to press the right key on your keyboard over and over again during boot while hoping for the best.

The question is, which is the right key? You don’t want the BIOS menu, unless you plan on changing it permanently. You only want the temporary boot menu, which another animal entirely.

So, I have a bunch of hardware. I also have a search engine. I’ve made an attempt to find the temporary boot menu keys and to document them all in one place.

The list of keys!

Acer: ESC, F2, or F12
Apple/Mac: OPTION
Asus: F8 or ESC
Compaq: ESC or F9
Dell: F12
HP: ESC or F9
Lenovo: F8, F10, or F12
MSI: F11
NEC: F5
Packard Bell: F8
Samsung: ESC, F2, or F12
Sony: F1, F2, or F3
Toshiba: F12

NOTE: This list isn’t exhaustive nor is it completely accurate. In some cases, you may need to actually enable this in your BIOS. Samsung, for example, will not show the temporary boot selection menu unless you’ve first disabled “Fast Boot”. Other OEMs may require similar changes.

The above keys should get you into the temporary boot menu, where you can choose to boot to USB, CD/DVD, an external drive, a microSD card, or whatever. It’s an essential step in both booting and repairing your Linux computer. It’s a good idea to memorize it once you know which one works for you.

As I mentioned above, you can help. If you have a device that’s not listed, please let me know in the comments. Some manufacturers have more than one way to access the screen, so be sure to let me know if your device is different. The more data we get, the more people we can help.

Thanks for reading! As always, feedback is fantastic, you can sign up for the newsletter, and you can donate. You don’t have to donate. The site will remain online regardless, but you can help cover the costs. If I keep this schedule up, we should have a new article in two more days – so stay tuned!

Is My System Capable of 32 or 64 Bit Linux?

There are a number of situations where you may not be sure if your CPU supports 32 or 64 bit Linux. If you want to know, it’s pretty easy to see if it supports 32 or 64 bit. If nothing else, it’s always good to know what your CPU architecture is and thus know which distros are compatible with your hardware.

You simply might not know this information. You wouldn’t be alone in that. These sort of questions pop up fairly regularly at the various support sites.

Maybe you were still new to Linux when you installed? Or maybe you’re working on a system that you yourself didn’t install? Perhaps you just don’t remember? There are a number of reasons why you’d want to know and why you might not already know.

Anyhow, this should be a relatively short article. There’s only so much fluff that I can add! I’m gonna tell you how to know for sure what architecture you can use.

Is my CPU 32 or 64 bit?

It was not that long ago that I saw someone asking this question at a forum I frequent. They wanted to know if their CPU supported 64 bit. The answer, which was well intended, was that they should run this command:

uname -a

uname -a

Which would indeed output this sort of text:

x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

1	x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

That’s great, but it’s not actually informative – as an answer to this specific question. What that command and output determine is that you’re using a specific variation of Linux. Granted, it’s true for those CPUs that support 62 bit and have a 62 bit CPU installed. It’s not always certain to be true, however.

For example, if you were using a 32 bit distro then the output from the ‘uname’ command would be 32 bit. You can run 32 bit Linux versions on 64 bit CPUs and the output will only be accurate so far as the version installed. After all, a 32 bit distro will run just fine on 64 bit hardware. Even if your hardware supports 64 bit, the uname command will output something about i686 if you have a 32 bit distro installed.

So, you could realistically have an output that says something about 32 bit while being perfectly capable of running 64 bit Linux versions. Using the uname command doesn’t tell you the hardware capability (necessarily). It tells you what is currently in use.

How do we know for sure? Well, there are a number of ways, but the easiest way that I can think of and it requires the terminal. Go ahead and open your terminal emulator by pressing CTRL + ALT + T on your keyboard.

Next, enter this ‘lshw‘ command:

sudo lshw -class processor

1	sudo lshw -class processor

In the output you will find something about ‘width’ and that’s your answer.

width: 64 bits

1	width: 64 bits

If you want, you can use ‘grep‘ to process the output and get an even easier, or at least more concise answer. Just use this command:

sudo lshw -class processor | grep width

1	sudo lshw -class processor \| grep width

With any luck, that won’t lie to you. That won’t tell you what you’re using, that will tell you what CPU architecture you can use. If your CPU architecture supports it, it will tell you right then and there.

I’ve prepared a graphical demonstration of when it may present inaccurate information. The CPU is capable of 64 bit, but the OS in question is actually just a 32 bit OS.

32 vs 64 bit demonstration — See? The 32 bit OS is in use and it could use 64 bit.

There’s no doubt with the ‘lshw’ command, you learn if you can use 32 or 64 bit versions of Linux. That’s why it’s important to use that command rather than relying out the output of ‘uname’, as the ‘uname’ output only only tells you what CPU architecture you are currently using and not what CPU architecture you could be using.

And, there you have it. Thanks for reading! Don’t forget that you can sign up for the newsletter, donate, or simply opt to contribute to the site with articles of your own. If you want to lend a hand, let me know. I’m receptive to such things, as I am receptive to feedback!

Graphically Examine Hardware Info With HardInfo

Sometimes old tools are the best, or at least adequate. In this case, we’re talking about HardInfo – a tool that hasn’t been updated in about 7 years, but still does a great job.

This is Linux. There are a ton of great applications to detect and list your hardware. Most of them are CLI. HardInfo is one application that lets you graphically detect and show your computer’s hardware. It’s rather out of date, but that doesn’t seem to hinder it any.

Welcome to HardInfo!

HardInfo used to be installed by default with Lubuntu. As near as I can tell, the last time it was included by default was in Bionic (18.04) and it has now been left aside as an old relic and with nothing replacing it.

You may remember it, but you may remember it with a different name. In your menu, it showed up as “System Profiler and Benchmark” and may well have been overlooked by many. Not me, I use it every time I get a new computer and want to check out the performance.

Allow me to explain…

See, it doesn’t just list the hardware that it finds, it also (as the menu entry implies) lets you run a bunch of pretty neat benchmarks. If your computer is fairly modern, then it will likely exceed all the default benchmarks listed in the program. It has been a long time since it has been updated, after all. Still, it’s great to see what your computer is capable of.

The great thing about it is that it’s simple and self-explanatory. I don’t really have to tell you how to use it. You can figure it out easily enough on your own. I only need to make you aware of it!

Installing it is easy enough. If you’re using a Debian/Ubuntu distro, or a derivative, you can install it right from your default repositories. This is true for most other distros, I suspect. I confess, I made absolutely no effort to look this up! Still, to install it in Ubuntu, you’d start by opening your terminal. Use your keyboard to open your default terminal by pressing CTRL + ALT + T.

Then, just run the following command:

sudo apt install hardinfo

1	sudo apt install hardinfo

Then, just open it from your menu – somewhere under system tools and by the name mentioned above. It should look a little like this:

hardinfo in action — See? This is nice and easy. Anyone can figure it out!

Scroll down and you can run a bunch of different benchmarks! Once again, this is entirely self-explanatory. If you use a more modern device, you’ll shatter the records listed for other computers – which is a nice boost of endorphins – like so!

HardInfo doing a quick benchmark. — See? Even my older computers slaughter the competition!

And, there you have it. HardInfo is still a pretty wonderful tool. I like it for all the benchmarks it offers. They’re a great way to get a rough estimate of performance. It’d be great if that section was updated with more modern devices, but I am not a very good programmer. Maybe one of you will download the source, fork it, update it, and maintain it? It’d be a great asset to the community!

Bonus: CPU-X

If you want something more modern, that gives the same information but has fewer benchmark choices, then you can always take a look at CPU-X. CPU-X is from the folks at X0rg (not to be confused with X.org) and has been updated much more recently. It’s a great GUI way to check your hardware. Once again, you can install it from your default repositories. Once again, that looks like this for Debian/Ubuntu/apt using distros:

sudo apt install cpu-x

1	sudo apt install cpu-x

It too is fairly self-explanatory. If you need help using it, perhaps Linux is not the best choice for you! Ha! I kid… If you need help using it, just go ahead and ask. I’ll do my best to get you sorted.

If you want a more modern version, you can download it. It’s a little complex, but not very. First stop, visit the CPU-X GitHub page and click on the latest release – on the right.

Once you’re there, you can download the AppImage, which is probably easiest. If you want, you can grab the package for your OS, it’ll be in tar.gz format. Open it with your archive manager.

Inside that archive, you’ll find some .deb files. You know what to do with those. First, extract the CPU-X .deb and then extract the ‘libcpuid’ file – not the one with dev in the title.

Once you have them both extracted, you need to install the appropriate library file before you install the CPU-X .deb. The library is a required dependency and the one in the default repositories is not new enough to work with the newer CPU-X.

You’ll also possibly get a warning that says you have an older version available in the repositories and that you should install that version instead of the newest version. You can skip that warning and install the newer version just fine. It shouldn’t break anything!

When you start CPU-X, it will ask you to run as root. To get all the information, you will need to run it as root. So, go ahead and either select “Run as Root” in the menu or go ahead and choose to run it as root when prompted. It will, of course, ask you for your password. If you’ve done it correctly, it will look a little like this:

cpu-x up and running — See? It works and it too is easy to understand. Sweet!

If you use the right arrow near the top, you’ll see there are benchmarks available. They’re two simple benchmarks where your computer generates prime numbers. You can select the duration and the number of threads. Other than that, it’s not really all that complicated or informative. It’s there if you want to.

Anyhow, there you have it. You have a couple of ways to graphically check your hardware information. If you don’t want to use something like inxi, this is the next best thing. Thanks for reading and be sure to sign up for the newsletter.