HowTo Boot Puppy directly from ISO by using SuperGRUB2 (SG2D)

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Re: Boot Puppy directly from .iso without making a DVD, Frugal or Full install

Post by Clarity »

@Michel804 wrote:I also need to do some reading as well.
This is really pretty simple.
Download it, make a CD/DVD or USB (both of these boot in 3 seconds). That's it.
Add your 2020 PUP ISOs to your folder "/BOOTISOS" or use the enclosed one on the USB.

Whenever you 3 second boot to the start Menu, and hit the enterkey:
  • Wait sometimes a minute, and all boot options found by SG2D will be presented for your selection.
I'm sure you'll get the hang of it. Enjoy!
BTW: Here's a wiki that should shorten your research considerably. Worked for me.
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Re: Boot Puppy directly from .iso without making a DVD, Frugal or Full install

Post by wiak »

williams2 wrote: Sat Aug 08, 2020 10:37 pmAll the bootloader does is copy vmlinuz and initrd.gz to ram.
It can do other things, like hide partitions, but mostly all that any bootloader does, is to copy vmlinuz and initrd.gz to ram and start vmlinuz executing.
Re-posted my comment (which became greatly expanded) here:

viewtopic.php?p=4033#p4033

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Re: Boot Puppy directly from .iso without making a DVD, Frugal or Full install

Post by oui »

all that is good an interesting but as long each puppy start with tons of little windows disturbing the user will the direct start from iso not be really comfortable because of Puppy itself! Same thing with quitting windows...

it is absurd...

as I often change my actual Puppy finding fun to try what the developers present us, I will and can't use some save file.

I know that a lot of other puppyist also often change and test lot of Puppy's.

I found diabolic to install windows not erasing themself after 5 second delay for question or information having to be in a menu item under System / Setup or Utility :mrgreen:
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Re: Boot Puppy directly from .iso without making a DVD, Frugal or Full install

Post by dellus »

I have some puppies installed as frugals together with Windows XP on an older BIOS computer via Grub4dos. I have tested SuperGRUB2 and are quite enticed about the ability to test newer puppies directly from the iso without a lot of fuzz. To spare me to have to put in a cd or an usb stick to boot SuperGRUB2 I would like to be able to boot it just like the puppies. Can it be installed at the same place, how to do it, or can a Puppy be made of it?

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Re: Boot Puppy directly from .iso without making a DVD, Frugal or Full install

Post by mikewalsh »

I was thinking of giving this a try to - yet again! - get HaikuOS running. Some of you may be aware, others not, that this is based on the abandoned BeOS operating system from the late 90s/early 'noughties'. Running from USB is the recommended method for trying it out.

I've never had any luck getting this to boot before. I eventually ended up using the "dd" command to write the ISO direct to a 16GB SanDisk Cruzer 'Fit'. At long last.....success!

Posting this from the HaikuOS 'WebPositive' browser, right now.

Mike. ;)

Puppy "stuff" ~ MORE Puppy "stuff" ~ ....and MORE! :D
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user1111

Re: Boot Puppy directly from .iso without making a DVD, Frugal or Full install

Post by user1111 »

dellus wrote: Sat Nov 14, 2020 11:26 pm

I have some puppies installed as frugals together with Windows XP on an older BIOS computer via Grub4dos. I have tested SuperGRUB2 and are quite enticed about the ability to test newer puppies directly from the iso without a lot of fuzz. To spare me to have to put in a cd or an usb stick to boot SuperGRUB2 I would like to be able to boot it just like the puppies. Can it be installed at the same place, how to do it, or can a Puppy be made of it?

I use a different approach to booting iso's. I have a minimal 'puppy' (Fatdog cli based kernel/busybox, built specifically for my hardware, so very small (5MB)), that includes kvm/qemu options. So with that booted I can qemu boot whatever iso's I have stored - potentially multiple instances (Puppy's) running at the same time.

My qemu boot line is

Code: Select all

QEMU_AUDIO_DRV=alsa qemu-system-x86_64 -soundhw ac97 \
-vnc :10 -monitor pty -k en-gb -smp 2 -boot d \
-net nic -net user,hostfwd=tcp::2222-:22 \
-machine type=pc,accel=kvm -cpu host -enable-kvm -m 2000 \
-usbdevice tablet \
-cdrom $ISO &

i.e. that ISO parameter is set to point the the .iso to be booted.

By default I'm using user-mode network qemu as that provides good separation/isolation albeit at some performance cost. Each of the family can run in separate 'guest wifi' areas (their own dedicated SSID) so by default firewalled/isolated from each other, excepting whatever sharing might be set up such as sshfs mounting of folders ...etc. Or log into the same SSID and share the same 'desktop' view/control (two laptops can for instance 'fight' over control of the mouse/keyboard :)).

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Re: Boot Puppy directly from .iso without making a DVD, Frugal or Full install

Post by dellus »

@rufwoof: I am not a coder, that qemu stuff is way beyond my horizon, but thanks anyway for your answer. I have managed to make a bootable usb of supergrub2 using easydd on Barry's Easypup and will leave it this way. I have made and used a cd before which was a familiar procedure for me. USB booting feels quicker.

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Re: Boot Puppy directly from .iso without making a DVD, Frugal or Full install

Post by johnrpm »

This looks excellent for later puppies, but I wanted to try 4.3 on an old bit of kit, so without the loopback.cfg nothing was listed, found bill's isobooter and it works well, once the usb stick is prepared, for me its simply a matter of replacing the iso on the stick and rename it to linux.iso, now have puppy 4.3 frugal installed, which is a lot faster than wary, at least on my ancient compaq tablet.
Puppy is fantastic for keeping old hardware running, but still requires a fair amount of trial and error to match the hardware to the kernel to get a reasonably quick system, It would be wonderful if a script could interrogate and suggest a suitable kernel, maybe a big ask though.

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Re: Boot Puppy directly from .iso without making a DVD, Frugal or Full install

Post by Clarity »

Hi @johnrpm

The PUP developers have put together an outstanding boot mechanism which has proven itself for over a year. The methods that ship with the 2020-2021 PUPs should work on either BIOS or UEFI PCs. The loopback.cfg they put there is a part of the GRUB2-EFI boot system and it works, either in standalone mode, frugal mode, or via SG2D.

This thread provides steps in its opening post that work. With it, you should see all of the PUP ISO in the /boot-isos folder that YOU created and added ISOs to it.

Question
Did you have problem with it not working for you? If so, would you post what happened, please.

Thanks in advance of your sharing what problem(s) you ran into. You should not need to modify any of the 2020-21 PUP's boot process to boot those ISOs found in your folder.

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Re: Boot Puppy directly from .iso without making a DVD, Frugal or Full install

Post by johnrpm »

Here is a link to isobooter for those interested, http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=67235

I think my problem was due to the age of the hardware, 2005-2007 era, I do not have it with me at present so can not get specs, I took it out of the scrap bin many years ago but is well made and just keeps working, can not bring myself to throw it away.

I created the usb OK and the bootisos folders in various places but non of the iso files were found, this hardware predates uefi with bios only, I really wanted to try
4.31 as it has a good reputation, It is more than possible that I did not do things properly and may well be my fault that it did not work.

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Re: Boot Puppy directly from .iso without making a DVD, Frugal or Full install

Post by tosim »

Thanks for that link to the old forum.

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Re: Boot Puppy directly from .iso without making a DVD, Frugal or Full install

Post by Clarity »

Thanks @johnrpm

It appears that you are using an older PUP ISO.

For those old PUPs, the SG2D process desribed in this thread will NOT work. Those older PUPs were NOT built using the modern methods the developers provide for BIOS-UEFI PCs.

The best PUP "direct" ISO boot solution for older PUP distros would be "isobooter" process.

A 2020-2021 PUPPY ISO kept in your /boot-isos folder will boot using the SG2D process.

This thread's process is in support of the modern PUP ISOs (also, all Ubuntus from past 5 years).

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Re: Boot Puppy directly from .iso without making a DVD, Frugal or Full install

Post by johnrpm »

Yes that is what I discovered, but having both tools in the toolkit means both old and new puppies can be tried on old and new kit, which
has to be a good thing, like others, I match the distro to the hardware and tools like these allow us to do so.

I am deeply grateful to all developers of opensource for their time and expertise in bringing so much to us who are less able, to many
to mention or know of, john murga was just one who enabled this community to evolve and I believe at his own expense.

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Re: Boot Puppy directly from .iso without making a DVD, Frugal or Full install

Post by rcrsn51 »

In my tests, ISObooter can still boot the recent hybrid UEFI-compatible Puppy ISOs.

On an actual UEFI machine, that assumes that it is in Legacy Mode and its CSM modules are compatible, which is not guaranteed.

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Re: Boot Puppy directly from .iso without making a DVD, Frugal or Full install

Post by johnrpm »

Whilst not wishing to divert this thread, I just put fossapup on the isobooter usb and booted it on a HP ProBook (5 years old'ish).
sure saves time faffing around.

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Re: Boot Puppy directly from .iso without making a DVD, Frugal or Full install

Post by Clarity »

Glad to hear that you have got the older Puppy's ISO booting for you. ISObooter can be found here, as it has been around for years and works.

There is a GRUB2 writeup for it in the wild, as well. I keep all my ISOs in a single /boot-isos folder. GRUB2 alleviates the concatenation issue when I need to select an older PUP ISO to boot.

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Re: Boot Puppy directly from .iso without making a DVD, Frugal or Full install

Post by Feek »

Clarity wrote: Wed Sep 02, 2020 9:40 pm
@Michel804 wrote:

I also need to do some reading as well.

This is really pretty simple.
Download it, make a CD/DVD or USB (both of these boot in 3 seconds). That's it.
Add your 2020 PUP ISOs to your folder "/BOOTISOS" or use the enclosed one on the USB.

Whenever you 3 second boot to the start Menu, and hit the enterkey:

  • Wait sometimes a minute, and all boot options found by SG2D will be presented for your selection.

I'm sure you'll get the hang of it. Enjoy!
BTW: Here's a wiki that should shorten your research considerably. Worked for me.

Hi,
I use Fatdog811 in multisession mode (sfs files on USB stick, ext3). Now I boot with Grub4dos.

Just out of curiosity: would it be possible to use SG2D for this purpose?

The multisession mode can´t use the original .iso, because the main FD .sfs has to be moved out of the initrd and the initrd repacked again.
Will it enable to set the boot options for multisession support?

Edit
Just an idea: maybe would help to create another .iso with modified files (in PackIt)... ?

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Re: Boot Puppy directly from .iso without making a DVD, Frugal or Full install

Post by Clarity »

YES! FATDOG was the 1st in 2019 from this community that was capable of booting via SG2D.

Make a SG2D USB, add your FD811 to the boot isos folder and boot the USB. If will present the FD811 ISO (and any other PUPs in that folder) for your selection. Boot your choice and operate them as you normally wold.

SG2D does NOT change anything you do with your PUPs or DOGS. It just eliminates the need for Frugal storage. You will continue to do saves as you normally do.

I, too, use FD multisessions to a disc folder. AT boot time at the FD menu, I hit "e" on the multimedia line and change sr0 to the disc where the multisessions reside.

Enjoy!

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Re: Boot Puppy directly from .iso without making a DVD, Frugal or Full install

Post by Feek »

Thanks for your reply.

I will play with it on another usb stick :)

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Re: Boot Puppy directly from .iso without making a DVD, Frugal or Full install

Post by r96chase »

Quick question: can I create a BOOTISOS folder within the SuperGRUB2 disk or do I have to use another USB just to create that?

I am a crash-course Linux novice. :lol:

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Re: Boot Puppy directly from .iso without making a DVD, Frugal or Full install

Post by Clarity »

Hello @r96chase. You ask about ISO placement for SG2D discovery and presenting the list of ISOs.

OK, the SG2D creates a USB with 2 partitions:

  1. The very tiny 1st has BIOS-UEFI boot,

  2. while the 2nd has a BOOTISOS folder containing a set of PUP-DOG ISOs.

My EXPERIENCES
For my USBs, I have a series of 2020-2021 PUPs&DOGs ISOs in that USB folder on the 2nd partition.
ALSO, I have placed (in addtition), /BOOTISOS folders on the local HDD as well. In those HDD folders, since I have more space in their parttitions, I will have a Superset of both POP-DOG but also Ubuntus, Rescatux, Clonezilla, etc.

SG2D, upon boot, lists all the ISOs on the USB's 2nd partition AS WELL AS the ISOs in the HDD..

I find the ability to place that foldername anywhere on the root of any HDD/SSD.SDD/USB/sdCard a bonus. AND, SG2D will find+list them; no matter if I boot via the USB created or by the CD/DVD it creates. Highly flexible and simple and organized is the benefit in its use.

Hope this helps.

Last edited by Clarity on Sun Apr 04, 2021 2:43 am, edited 3 times in total.
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Re: Boot Puppy directly from .iso without making a DVD, Frugal or Full install

Post by Clarity »

Oh, this might be useful to some who want to organise their Save-sessions. I keep an EXT4 partition of every PC's HDD. On that partition, I have a "Sessions" folder. On shutdown of PUPs/DOGs, I save my session into that folder. This is done for my personal organizational purposes and it is the same of every PC I boot a PUP to.

When I reboot that ISO, at its GRUB2 menu, I hit "e" and add 'psave' to the 'linux' menu line identifying the partition and folder name. For example,

Code: Select all

linux...psave=sda6:/Sessions/

Hope this helps in both understanding and allow you thoughful organization in your use to your benefit.

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Re: Boot Puppy directly from .iso without making a DVD, Frugal or Full install

Post by wiak »

Clarity wrote: Sat Aug 08, 2020 8:41 pm

My choice of GRUB2 is almost obvious. GRUB2 is the default bootloader for many public Linux distributions. GRUB2 reads  all current file systems formats. It can boot directly almost all OSs, while also chainloading other bootloaders to boot their OS.

GRUB2 is ALSO useful as its “command line” is BASH-like. This is extremely useful for some obvious reasons as it allows controlling boot steps individually to observe a distro boot behavior...before kernel invocation. You can see the drives connected, plus …. So for me, again, this can be useful.

Actually I agree with you on this one (despite also being an 'old-timer' myself). As an old-timer I feel also thus guilty at times of not always being quick to move to something new (having to learn it first); I have, however (reluctantly at first) used grub2, and via its various config files, and well know it is a better and more-flexible boot system by far than grub4dos in the long run. In fact, most new system designs (including systemd by the way) adopt similar config approaches - really we should learn to love them (embrace them) rather than lazily rejecting everything we are not confident with. I change over time, and I will work on these matters for WeeDogLinux in the future too. Guaranteed.

WeeDogLinux is not Puppy of course. Nor is it a derivative of Puppy, but I do notice that some Puppy developments are 'borrowing' some key WeeDogLinux concepts, which is great (especially when WeeDogLinux is acknowledged where appropriate). Though WeeDogLinux is not derived from the DebianDogs either, I am relatively familiar with DD distros, and the selection of modules used in WDL at boot time was from what DD Porteus boot uses, and I acknowledged that when I described the module selection used long ago. I was particularly familiar with (only) that part of Porteus init code because it was myself that added SD card boot support to DebianDog(s) (in the choice of SD card required modules and via related mods to some other DD system scripts). I strongly believe that collaboration is good for all Linux distros (and advocate for that), with the proviso of proper acknowledgement of course since original ideas involve a lot of hard work and time so re-writes of code in any shape or form should never be used to hide the actual source of inspirations/algorithms/methodologies (despite any underlying implementation changes).

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Re: Boot Puppy directly from .iso without making a DVD, Frugal or Full install

Post by gyrog »

Just to clarify a couple of things:

1. There hae been changes to the Puppy 'init' script in woof-ce to support grub2 booting iso's, it is not surprising that older Puppies that do not have these changes, will not work in this environment.

2. You do not actually need SG2D to do this, it's a feature of grub2, all you need is a Puppy that uses grub2 rather than grub4dos.
However, using SG2D makes it a whole lot simpler.

Just for interest sake, here is an example of a grub2 boot-entry to boot the eslacko iso file:

Code: Select all

menuentry "Puppy eslacko64 6.9.9.12 iso" {
    insmod ext2
    set pup_id="xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx"
    search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set  $pup_id
    set isofile="/isos/eslacko64-6.9.9.12.iso"
    loopback loop $isofile
    set root=(loop)
    echo "Loading vmlinuz"
    linux (loop)/vmlinuz libata.noacpi=1 net.ifnames=0 pmedia=atahd iso_dev=$pup_id find_iso=$isofile pfix=fsck,fsckp TZ=AEST-10
    echo "Loading initrd.gz"
    initrd (loop)/initrd.gz
}

Where "xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx" is the UUID of the partition that contains the iso file.
You can get the UUID for any partition via the CLI utility 'blkid'.

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