Update on sneakernet issue (solved)

Software
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Some time back I’d mentioned not being able to ‘sneakernet’ a copy of KiCAD to my work PC.

I finally decided to try again the other day and downloaded a fresh copy of the Windows installer .exe to my Mac (normally, this is not an issue) then copied it to my USB flash drive, only for my work PC to complain again the installer was corrupt.

Fortunately, I have a Windows 7 box at home that serves as a monitor stand most of the time. Last night I downloaded the installer to that box before copying it to my USB flash drive. I just now successfully installed KiCad on my work PC (Windows 10).

So, macOS is doing something to the installer file when saving it. Anyway, just wanted to share.

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I downloaded the Windows installer kicad-7.0.8-x86_64.exe on both my Mac running Ventura 13.6 and a Windows 10 PC. I then did a SHA256 checksum on both machines and got exactly the same checksum. I then copied the file from the Downloads folder on my mac to a USB thumb drive and again checked the SHA256 checksum of the file on the USB drive. Again, it was exactly the same checksum. I’m quite sure macOS didn’t do anything to the file, your problem must have been elsewhere.

Interestingly, it took far longer to copy the file to the USB thumb drive than it did to download it from the GitHub servers over the internet.

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More than likely it’s because macOS still doesn’t flush to USB sticks on demand.

Microsoft switched Windows 7+ to immediately flush to USB disk all the time. macOS still follows the paradigm where the OS may have it cached and not written to disk. You have to use the eject media option in macOS to be completely safe.

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As we are speaking of flushing to USB stick; what does Linux do?
Is it different on different (recent and common) distros or is there a common practice?
Fedora, Ubuntu for example?

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Something tells me it isn’t automatic flush, given how much people emphasize their 20 year old flash drives could be killed by it…as if most people still use 20 year old flash drives lol

But you have to change your udev mount options to include sync

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I always make sure to eject the thumb drive before unplugging it, and that was the first and only file (thus far) I’d not been able to move between computers in this fashion.

I’ll just accept that I must have done something wrong then. Moving along…!

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