Caligula is a tool for burning ROMs to drives. It was made as a replacement for dd and Balena Etcher, and was borne out of frustrations with both.

This is a non-exhaustive feature list:

• pretty graphs
• removable USB device detection
• compressed inputs
• SHA-verification of inputs
• automatically running su, sudo, or doas for you
• post-write disk verification

Supported systems:

• /(aarch64|x86_64)-(darwin|linux)/

Motivation

My frustrations with dd:

• Being unixware, it is comically minimal as usual
• It won’t detect removable USB devices for you
• You need to remember type in the same string of flags
• Lack of good progress indicators on all systems (no, status=progress is not good enough and it’s also Linux-only)
• No builtin SHA verification
• No post-write correctness verification

My frustrations with Etcher:

• It’s a 100MB electron blob
• It spies on you
• It’s not a terminal app
• Seriously why do you need a web browser to write bytes to a disk
• For how often compressed ISOs are distributed, it’s kinda shameful that

My frustrations with both:

• No pretty graphs
• NIH syndrome

Development

The bulk of the project was completed in 9 days, during weekends, nights, and lunch breaks. This got the project to a state where I could release it, with features like:

• the Wizard
• removable USB device detection
• pretty graphs
• compressed inputs
• disk verification

There are features occasionally added, when I have the time and motivation to add them.

Reception

It’s the first repo I’ve made that got over 100 stars on Github. Supposedly people use it.