For those who are choosing to:
You might run into a problem running Balena Etcher on Ubuntu. For me, the appimage would just silently fail to run. Running these two commands from the command line got me unblocked:
sudo add-apt-repository universe
sudo apt-get install libfuse2Hopefully this helps someone googling for the problem.
I just flashed the image to the M.2 drive directly.
OMG thank you, thank you thank you. I’m trying to setup a new HASS mini-PC for my friend today, and after booting into Ubuntu live I couldn’t get Balena Etcher to run and I was losing my mind. Every forum post on the entire internet I could find about this, even ones from just a month or two ago, said you had to install libfuse2 on Ubuntu 22.04 to get .appimage files to execute, but I couldn’t get libfuse2 to install…thank you for saving me.
This reminded me of why I gave up on Linux years ago. The whole point of AppImage was to simplify app installation because installing software on Linux was often not user-friendly…AppImage is supposed to “just work”…and of course it doesn’t.
not working.
tom@tom-9900KF:~/Downloads$ ./balenaEtcher-1.7.9-ia32.AppImage
dlopen(): error loading libfuse.so.2
AppImages require FUSE to run.
You might still be able to extract the contents of this AppImage
if you run it with the --appimage-extract option.
See FUSE · AppImage/AppImageKit Wiki · GitHub
for more information
This helped me to start balena. It’s now flashing HAOS to my harddrive. Many thanks
Balena Etcher has some NVIDIA GPU problems with Ubuntu 22.04.
The workaround for now is to launch balena with --disable-gpu-sandbox, so basically;
./balenaEtcher-1.7.9-x64.AppImage --disable-gpu-sandbox
See more: "GPU process isn't usable" on Ubuntu 22.04 with NVIDIA GPU · Issue #3796 · balena-io/etcher · GitHub
The error messages (so people with the same problem will find this thread):
libva error: vaGetDriverNameByIndex() failed with unknown libva error, driver_name = (null)
FATAL:gpu_data_manager_impl_private.cc(415)] GPU process isn't usable. Goodbye.
Thank you
This worked for me - Ubuntu 22 on USB - installed balenaEtcher using shell.
Many thanks, this got me going
Thanks a lot. Works as described and thus enabled the installation of Home Assistant 2022.12.1 on an Intel NUC via bootable USB stick.
Posting this here if anyone run into the same issues as me.
I struggled a few hours to get this working on a Dell Wyse but couldn’t get Etcher to work no matter what I did.
I ended up flashing Linux Mint on a usb stick, booted up and everything works out of the box. No errors when starting Etcher and flashing the mSATA drive worked without any issues.
That’s brilliant, thanks for taking the time to post this. I’ve been tearing my hair out trying to get it working.
How i did it:
ubuntu live usb stick
then pick up ubuntu graphics
then:
sudo add-apt-repository universe
sudo apt-get install libfuse2
sudo apt-get install libgconf2-4
sudo apt-get install libcanberra-gtk-module libcanberra-gtk3-module
then go to website balenaEtcher - Flash OS images to SD cards & USB drives download linux and pick up your version
then right click on the file and make sure it can exec the file
that will do the trick
i hope it helps someone
You’re all aware of how ridiculous it sounds that you have to load an ENTIRELY different OS, and install a whole bunch of nonsense, just to get this OS to work?
I’ve been fighting with this for about 6 hours now, and I’m about to say screw it and throw the whole thing in the trash. Infuriating. I keep getting errors saying I’m out of space, and issues with sparse files, and a whole bunch of other stuff that makes no sense.
You don’t have to. Put your SSD in an USB-case, attach to your Windows PC and flash from there. But if you want to save money and not use an USB-case, that there is an alternative.
I’d love to, but I don’t have an nvme/m.2 to usb case, and nobody near me has one in stock. 
No matter, I FINALLY got all this stuff to work late last night.
I think the issue I was having was in trying to unxz the image file that I had downloaded locally. Once I tried to have etcher just download the xz and flash it from the url, it finally worked.
Found the issue to all Balena Etcher related problems, the version was the culprit,
Wrote a complete guide here
This just solved my last hour of research and frustration. THANK YOU!
there is an image writing tool on this version i’m trying that, i’ll let you know how it goes
start up disc creator its called
by per chance does anyone know how to get an old sonic master asus to recognise usb drives again? I need to reinstall my OS on it and its for some reason lost all will to recognise boot usb drives. i’m trying it with a sd card in a usb card reader as i think its an issue with the usb i had the install file on as it wouldn’t let me format it either
its so confusing with 3 different ubuntu os but i’m happy with the desktop version 22.04 i keep saying 24.04 lol dyslexia sucks i got a slating for that on another help site hahaa