Bootsmith 1.1.0

Four new features, each exercised against a real block device.

Compressed images — write straight from .xz, .gz, .zip and .bz2 without unpacking first. Raspberry Pi OS, Armbian and OpenWrt all ship this way; unpacking by hand costs twice the disk space and an extra step. Decompression runs in flow, block by block, and nothing intermediate touches the disk. .xz uses Apple's Compression framework, which reads the container under the LZMA algorithm — no dependency on the xz binary, which macOS does not ship. The expanded size comes from the archive's own index, so the progress bar stays honest.

Checksum verification — paste a SHA-256, or the whole contents of a SHA256SUMS file and Bootsmith finds the line matching your image. A corrupt ISO writes without complaint and only reveals itself in front of the server.

Restore the drive — after receiving an ISO, a stick is unreadable to Finder, which offers only to initialize it. One menu reformats it as exFAT or FAT32 and gives the stick back.

Drives appear on their own — no more clicking Refresh, plus a warning when the selected disk is large enough to be an external drive rather than a USB stick.

Tested: the same image written from all four formats produces byte-identical results on the device, with exact expanded size and boot mode read through the decompression.

Install

brew install --cask mesquitadev/tap/bootsmith
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Bootsmith.app

Bootsmith 1.0.1

Fixes the write path, found by exercising it against a real block device.

• authopen -o flags does not combine with -w: the number was parsed as a second filename and the open failed.
• The -w form, which copies stdin, kills the process with SIGPIPE if authopen exits early — a crash with no message in a GUI app. Bootsmith now receives the descriptor over SCM_RIGHTS and writes to it directly: no extra copy, no fatal signal, and one authorization covers both the write and the verification.
• The raw node requires 512-byte alignment. An image whose size is not a multiple of 512 would fail on its final block; it is now zero-padded, and verification reads aligned and trims the excess before hashing.

Tested against a real device: an odd-sized image writes and verifies, and a corrupted sector is detected.

Install

brew install --cask mesquitadev/tap/bootsmith
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Bootsmith.app

Grant Full Disk Access to Bootsmith in System Settings › Privacy & Security — since macOS 13 removable volumes are protected and even root cannot open /dev/rdiskN without it.

Bootsmith 1.0.0

First release.

Install

brew install --cask mesquitadev/tap/bootsmith
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Bootsmith.app

Or download Bootsmith.zip below, unzip, and move Bootsmith.app to Applications.

The app is signed ad-hoc, not notarized by Apple — notarization needs a paid Apple Developer account. macOS refuses the first launch until you clear the quarantine flag with the command above, or right-click the app → Open → Open once.

Grant Full Disk Access to Bootsmith in System Settings › Privacy & Security. Since macOS 13 removable volumes are protected, and without it even root cannot open /dev/rdiskN.

What it does

Writes hybrid Linux images (Ubuntu, Debian, Proxmox, Fedora, Rocky) to a USB drive so it boots on both legacy BIOS machines and modern UEFI ones. It reads the image to report how it boots, names the volumes you are about to destroy, and verifies the drive against the image afterwards.

No partition scheme to choose: a modern Linux ISO already carries a boot signature in the MBR and an EFI System Partition. Bootsmith reports what it found and copies byte for byte.

Universal binary (Apple Silicon + Intel), macOS 14+. English and Portuguese (Brazil).