Writing to an USB stick on Fedora 19

[Florian Weimer]

What's the correct way to write an image to a USB stick?  I don't write 
to it while any file systems are mounted.  Mounting happens 
automatically when I plug in the stick, and if I click "Eject" in the 
GNOME notification, the /dev/sdb block device assigned to the stick is 
still present, but dead—the open system call fails with ENOMEDIUM.

I've got a fairly default Fedora 19 installation, running GNOME in 
Classic Mode, still running the 3.11.6-201.fc19.x86_64 kernel.

(Right now, I overwrite the start of the stick with zeros while the 
system is mounted, sync, unplug, and the plug it in again, for the 
actual write operation, but that can't be the right thing to do.)

-- 
Florian Weimer / Red Hat Product Security Team