So over the years (decade?) I’ve used Ventoy a lot. For those not aware, it is basically a live USB that you can add other ISOs to to boot into those. Usually overkill but incredibly useful for those days when you need diagnostics, a simple terminal, and then to install something what you actually want.

But… it feels like I run into corner cases and issues with ventoy more often than not. Proxmox or Fedora or whatever decide to do something even slightly different and then I need to upgrade ventoy and blah blah blah. Also… I am not the most comfortable with downloading anything from Sourceforge these days. Let alone something that is going to have a LOT of power over whatever machines I provision.

So I suspect the real answer is to either set up a way to network boot (although, not all machines support that) or buy like five cheap USB drives and put them on a keychain and not over-complicate things.

But if I DID want to over-complicate them… is there anything better than Ventoy these days?

Thanks

  • Jordan_U
    5·
    10 months ago

    I tried to solve these cross-distro compatibility problems in a generic way with this “standard”, more years ago than I’d like to think about:

    https://www.supergrubdisk.org/wiki/Loopback.cfg

    If someone wants to come up with a bootloader agnostic solution rather than one tied to grub, like an extension to Bootloader spec , https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/BootLoaderSpec/ , I’d be happy to evangelize it and add support to grub for using it.

    I’m not aware of any other bootloader that supports reading a config file that exists within an iso though, and secure boot support may add additional complications.

    Bottom line:

    I feel like we could relatively easily get to a point where every Live iso that actually supports loop booting can just be added, as a file, to your USB drive (from Windows, or your android phone even) and be detected at boot in a nice little menu, no editing of config files needed.

    I don’t have the time or spoons to get the Linux community there alone, but if people are interested in helping I’m more than happy to pick this up again.

    (Note: Please don’t blindly suggest “Just chain load the iso!” Things aren’t that easy, unfortunately).