Ghativega

Utkirna v1.0.0

Posted on 04/11/2023 12:52:28 AM GMT

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+This is the initial release of Utkirna, a cross-platform application heavily inspired from Win32DiskImager that lets you to write a raw disk image to a removable device or backup a removable device to a raw image file. It is useful for preparing bootable drives with "dd like" images for PC, SBC and embedded development boards as well for backing up such drives. +Utkirna (devanagari: उत्कीर्ण, romanized: Utkīrṇa) means "engraved" in Sanskrit. +

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The reason of its creation

+I always wanted to created this sort of application for a long time, perhaps ever since balenaEtcher was a thing as I hated the idea of an electron app which basically mimicks what dd command does while consuming unnecessary amount of memory for doing such a simple task. I am aware that people don't like using dd due to screwing things up easier, but this certainly was not the way. Suprisingly, there are not other cross-platform applications which does similar job to my knowledge even till this day. The only application that I know that was similar to balenaEtcher is Win32DiskImager which obvious by its name, is only for Windows. Hence, this started my interest to develop similar cross-platform application which isn't made using dreaded electron. +

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Development

+Earlier on, I was planning to use C with Nuklear (for the UI) for the development. However, as I started experimenting with Go, I realised that it would be more sensible to use this language for desktop applications due to its simplicity yet not losing a lot of performance compared to C. And after discovering about Fyne a fantastic GUI toolkit, this pretty much sealed the deal for me. +

+To have some kind of idea on how these type of applications worked (on the basis of how it read or write a disk or a raw image file), Win32DiskImager greatly helped me and even clarified me on what sort of libraries would I require to accomplish this task. The only real issue I had was to implement my own Windows interfaces for some IOCTL and FSCTL operations (which is done through DeviceIoControl) as Go didn't have native support for those (which I am going to upstream someday) but it really wasn't hard to do so. +

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Features

+In the current state, the program supports: +

Reading through a removable disk and saving it as a raw image file.
Writing a raw image file or anything which is "dd compatible" to the disk.
Verification of a raw image through the disk and vice versa.

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Installation & Usage

+Go to the Github repository for further instructions. +

+ -- cgit v1.2.3