Penguaçu-Flash

Create bootable Windows 7 · 8.1 · 10 · 11 USB drives, from Linux — the easy way

A fully self-contained AppImage that formats your USB, copies Windows, and injects a personalized autounattend.xml — so the installation runs unattended, with your account, language, and privacy tweaks already set.

🌍 Read this in: English · Português · Español · 中文 · हिन्दी · العربية

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✨ Why Penguaçu-Flash?

Making a Windows install USB on Linux usually means juggling parted, mkntfs, 7z, and boot-sector tools by hand — and then Windows still stops halfway through setup asking questions. Penguaçu-Flash does the whole thing in a single window:

• 🐧 Runs anywhere — one self-contained AppImage. No dependencies to install: 7-Zip, mkntfs, and ms-sys are bundled inside.
• 💾 Real bootable USB — partitions, formats NTFS, copies Windows, and writes the boot sectors for both UEFI and BIOS/legacy.
• 🪄 Truly unattended — injects a personalized autounattend.xml so setup flies past the questions with your username, password, hostname, timezone, and edition already filled in.
• 🧭 Windows 7 → 11, auto-detected — the version is recognized from the ISO filename, and the answer file adapts to each version's schema.
• 🛡️ Windows 11 without the roadblocks — optional bypass for the TPM 2.0, Secure Boot, RAM and CPU requirements.
• 🔒 Privacy out of the box — toggle off telemetry, Cortana, automatic BitLocker, sponsored apps, and more.
• 📊 Honest progress — the progress bar tracks bytes physically written to the device (with live MB/s), not the deceptive page-cache number.
• 🌐 Speaks 6 languages — Portuguese, English, Spanish, Chinese, Hindi and Arabic (with full right-to-left layout).

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📸 Screenshots

Select the ISO	Identity & edition
Privacy tweaks	Pre-installed programs
Remove Windows apps	Create the bootable USB

Done!

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🚀 Download & run

1. Grab the latest Penguaçu-Flash-*.AppImage from the Releases page.
2. Make it executable and run it:

chmod +x Penguaçu-Flash-*.AppImage
./Penguaçu-Flash-*.AppImage

That's it — no installation, no dependencies. The privileged steps (partitioning, formatting, writing boot sectors) ask for your password once through your system's standard authorization dialog.

Tip: on KDE/GNOME you can also just double-click the AppImage in your file manager.

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🧭 How to use

Step	What happens
1. ISO	Drop in your Windows ISO. The version (7/8.1/10/11) is detected automatically.
2. Identity	Set the username, password, computer name, timezone, edition and (optionally) product key.
3. Tweaks	Pick the privacy/behavior tweaks and, for Windows 11, the requirements bypass.
4. Create	Choose Build ISO (a new customized .iso) or Create USB (format + copy + inject a ready-to-boot drive).
5. Done	Boot the target machine from the USB — Windows installs itself with your settings.

You can also analyze an existing USB, read back its autounattend.xml, and re-inject an updated configuration without rebuilding anything.

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🛠️ Build from source

Requirements: Node.js 18+ and podman or docker. mkntfs and ms-sys are compiled inside a Debian 11 container (glibc 2.31) so the AppImage also runs on older distributions such as Ubuntu 20.04 — copying them from a modern build machine produces binaries the user's system cannot load. Set PENGUACU_NO_CONTAINER=1 to copy from your own system instead (faster, not portable).

git clone https://github.com/vitormoreiradesenvolvedor/penguacu-flash.git
cd penguacu-flash
npm install

# Downloads/compiles the bundled binaries (7-Zip, mkntfs, ms-sys) into ./bin
npm run prepare-bins

# Produces dist/Penguaçu-Flash-<version>.AppImage
npm run dist

# Checks the bundled binaries load on old glibc (Ubuntu 20.04 level)
npm run test:bins

To run it live during development:

npm start

Project layout

├── main.js              # Electron main process — USB/ISO logic, IPC handlers
├── preload.js           # contextBridge API exposed to the renderer
├── index.html           # The whole UI (wizard, i18n dictionary, styles)
├── lib/
│   └── bins.js          # Resolves bundled/system binaries (glibc compatibility)
├── test/
│   └── bins-compat.test.js
├── scripts/
│   ├── prepare-bins.sh  # Builds/fetches bundled binaries (in a container)
│   ├── test-bins-in-container.sh
│   └── afterPack.js     # Wraps the Electron binary (env + noise filter)
└── build/
    ├── icon.svg         # Source icon
    └── icons/           # Rendered PNG sizes

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🤝 Contributing

Contributions are very welcome — this project exists to help the Linux community, and it gets better with more hands. 🐧

• 🌐 Translations: the UI dictionary lives in index.html (I18N object). Adding or improving a language is a great first PR.
• 🐛 Bugs & ideas: open an issue with clear steps to reproduce.
• 🔧 Code: fork, branch off development, and open a pull request against it.

See CONTRIBUTING.md for the full guide. Branch model:

• master — stable, released code.
• development — where new work lands before the next release.

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⚠️ Disclaimer

Creating a bootable USB erases all data on the selected drive. Double-check you picked the right device. Product keys shown in the app are Microsoft's public generic/KMS setup keys — they select the edition during setup but do not activate Windows. Activate with a valid license.

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📄 License

Released under the MIT License — free to use, modify and share.

Made with 🐧 for the Linux community.