Nico's blog

Discovering a new compression/uncompression tool: xz

I am not really using my PineBook Pro laptop, so I wanted to reinstall a vanilla Manjora distro on it, before selling it.

So I downloaded an image from the Manjaro website, but when I looked at the download, the file name was:

".img.xz"? ".xz"? I had no clue, so I tried with a few tar parameters, but no luck.

Then I tried a man xz in FreeBSD, and got greeted by XZ(1):

xz, unxz, xzcat, lzma, unlzma, lzcat - Compress or decompress .xz and .lzma files

unxz seemed to be what I was looking for, which the man page confirmed:

unxz is equivalent to xz --decompress.

So after an unxz Manjaro-ARM-xfce-pbpro-23.02.img.xz, I indeed got the image uncompressed, and I could then dd it into a USB stick with a

dd if=Manjaro-ARM-xfce-pbpro-23.02.img of=/dev/da0 bs=1m

Tags: IT, FreeBSD