Ventoy Setup Guide for booting ISO/IMG files directly

[Clarity]

A Best Practices for forum distros: Ventoy, A Multimedia Setup Guide

[Clarity]

Improvements on the document's readability welcomed.

[bigpup]

This seems to be better documentation.
It is already a topic in the forum.
viewtopic.php?t=5352

Note:
For running Ventoy inPuppy Linux.
Use the Linux Ventoy version for Linux GUI -- GTK/QT

By default, Ventoy select exFAT filesystem for the main partition to hold iso files.
You can reformat the 1st partition with other filesystem, exFAT/FAT32/NTFS/UDF/XFS/Ext2/Ext3/Ext4 are supported.

For Puppy Linux it would be best to make this partition one of the ext formats.
Most Puppy versions have no support for exFAT format or very little.

[wiak]

Yes, for most distros (those that are designed for full installation or live iso and frugal installation) Ventoy is really handy for quickly seeing what the distro looks like.

It is not a universal solution for general distro usage for most distros though because not all distro's thereafter allow os-related saves to work (e.g. after installing new apps via package manager). Some frugal installable distros support save persistence with Ventoy, some simply don't.

Since Ventoy is generally being used as a multi-distro boot mechanism, even with those distros that support save persistence there can be another issue: save persistence collision, by which I mean the need for separate distros to be have their save persistence folders or save files stored in their own separate space. Some distros neatly put the save persistence into their own separate directory that is nicely separate from the BOOTISOs folder (or wherever the distro isos are being stored) - otherwise it gets very messy with isos and save persistence files/folders all ending up in the same BOOTISOS directory, and usually you don't want save persistence to usb stick if you can avoid it (for well known reason regarding usb speed and longevity when continually writing to it).

Good news is when a distro has been specially designed/packaged so that it works optimally with Ventoy. I've done that for all current KL distros (be that KLV, KLA, or KLU and their flavours); each of these KL distros not only work perfectly well including save persistence when booted from a Ventoy usb, but also allow for their individual save persistence files or folders to be stored elsewhere than the usb stick on the underlying computer system: into any partition given the volume label "Persistence" - the individual save files or folders are automatically put into a folder named "Sessions" within there, so the result is all very neat and tidy and optional save on demand works perfectly well. However, KL also does allow save persistence back to the Ventoy usb stick for those that want that portable convenience - the save files/folders are then automatically put into a directory named "Sessions" on that Ventoy usb stick. NOTE WELL, that for this save back to Ventoy usb method to work it is important to label the usb stick partition that contains the BOOTISOS folder as LABEL: Ventoy.

I leave it up to those who use other distros here to explain how and how well their distros boot with Ventoy, particularly in terms of save persistence ability or otherwise and separation of where saves are made.

I am certainly happy to confirm that Ventoy is an excellent mechanism for booting and running all current KL variations including full save persistence support with full FirstRib overlayfs frugal install flexible/functionality.

[mikewalsh]

Whilst I agree that Ventoy does work very well for "trying-out" live distros in order to get a "feel" for them, this IS basically its primary function. I fail to see the point in then attempting to set a distro up permanently using Ventoy as the "boot-system".

Once the user has tried a distro - and found they like it - does it not make more sense to then set said distro up properly on the user's main internal drive, using a more "traditional" boot-loader? I feel we're in danger of over-estimating Ventoy's importance in the scheme of things.

Doubtless others will disagree with me.....but then I've always been something of a traditionalist!

Mike.

[Clarity]

The Ventoy document is geared specifically toward a design for use with forum distros.

The document does NOT address session-saves as that is left to the users and their use with the various "classes" (namely WoofCE PUPs/KL's/DOGs) of forum distros. Session management is different in practice with the distros from eadh class.

The following are some brief statements for session-management understanding on several of the forum distro classes.

PUP distros
For WoofCE PUPs, there is a file, namely SAVESPEC that gets deposited in the BOOTISOS partition that tells PUPs where the sessions are found on the system. Importantly, too, it tells pristine boots where to store the sessions on the PC's system.

This feature, designed by @gyrog, that is great.

For WoofCE PUPs, too, if a particular distro has multiple sessions saved, upon boot the distro will stop awaiting the users to select which save to be used before proceeding to desktop.

This means that when booting from Ventoy or its accompanying SG2D, NO efforts are needed for the user at the distro menu for the PUP to proceed to desktop. This means NO changes to distro's GRUB2 or the distro's GRUB4DOS is ever required.

KL distros
For KL's, its beauty is in the options that the KL's provide in its GRUB menus which cover booting for most of the boot-time selections negating any need for user intervention for distro operations and session saving by the boot choices it offers. As is mentioned by @wiak, for having multiple KL's, it does require the user to edit a boot stanza such that the sessions are placed/found separately for the various KL's a user might have in his BOOTISOS folder.

FATDOG distros
At FATDOG Menu on boot, the user will need to interrupt the boot to make a change in the boot stanza indicating where and how the session is to be saved on the stanza's linux line.

Future
Sometime in the future, I will try to present a document outlining the various manners that sessions can be defined on boot stanzas to guide the booting forum distro to locate the folder containing sessions. Each class of forum distro uses different boot stanza parameters indicating where sessions should be saved or found during boot.

@bigpup you might want to review the document I offer. In its reference section it already list @wizard's forum thread.

Hope this is helpful

[Clarity]

Hi @mikewalsh

You may be missing something important that these ISO file booters offer.

Anyone is welcomed to continue to use the methods of the past of extracting ISO file contents, selecting various methods for where to place stuff, creating GRUB2 or GRUB4DOS entries, and addressing any of the debugging problem seen in the past.

The ISO file booters offer to relieve users of all of that which often times confuses new users and even experienced users when they cannot get their boot stanzas working to match file placements created by the extractions.

There is no need to do what you suggest...unless, as you say, "... traditionalist".

Any user gets the EXACT same 'frugal' behavior we have come to expect from all of the forum distros over the years...without the need for extractions anymore. In essence, this is a frugal existence...just without extractions.

Of course, again, anyone can choose to continue running frugals from the ISO files or they can opt use of extracting for either full or frugal use.

Hope this is helpful.

[Clarity]

Just in case readers might miss this important note for your Ventoy USB:

1. Keep ALL ISO/IMG files in the BOOTISOS folder you create

2. Add SG2D's ISO or IMG file to the BOOTISOS folder. This is because, sometimes, depending on various conditions hardware and firmware, a forum distro may struggle attempting to get to its desktop. When this occurs when trying to boot the distro from the Ventoy Menu list, select the SG2D to boot from the list, then select the forum distro from the SG2D list to boot the distro to desktop.

If the forum distro does not boot from either, report the problem to the distro's thread or the distro's author. In my cases in the past years, the authors have been receptive to reports and have corrected misbehavior in all SG2D boots. This is true in several occasions for Ventoy problems too.

Hope this is helpful

[wiak]

...for having multiple KL's, it does require the user to edit a boot stanza such that the sessions are placed/found separately for the various KL's a user might have in his BOOTISOS folder.

That statement is incorrect. KL variants need no user intervention for save persistence to correctly work whatsoever when booted via Ventoy. i.e If user is booting different KL variants (e.g. KLV-Airedale, KLA-OT2, KLA-XFCE, KLU ...) then absolutely no manual editing is required to grub boot stanza at all; i.e. the session separation into 'own' specific-named folder is done totally automatically without user intervention needed at all. You can even have different release numbers of same KL variant and no manual intervention is required because the rc number is also used in the auto-naming of where save persistence is stored. Nor is any external file (such as that Puppy SAVESPEC) file needed to arrange such separation (though an external file for optional KL distro user editing, for such purposes, can be easily be added via KL's w_init boot file - however, I see no point for doing so as things stand with KL approach, which simply works without doing anything more).

Is Ventoy useful for a daily driver boot? Well, I do myself also regard Ventoy as primarily useful as a quick distro test run, but actually works perfectly well for everyday KL distro booting whether intended for that or not. I do myself prefer using 'normal' traditional frugal installation for various reasons, but Ventoy is okay, which is why I am happy to support it thus far. SG2D, more as a last resort (again KL distros do work with SG2D including persistence) - SG2D not a user-friendly menu mechanism at all though - I'm sure it could have been developed into such, but it simply isn't as it stands; KL doesn't need SG2D at all though - work fine with straight Ventoy.

[Clarity]

... That statement is incorrect. ...

Thanks for the correcting idea that I did a poor job of presenting. It was done in haste.

I intend, as you are showing, to present a single document that provides a best practice for saving sessions for most of the various classes of forum distros; in the future. I see this kind of document as essential as it would provide in one place, the concepts necessary for session management in one folder on a user's system.

I should have done a better brief statement as what I was thinking was the following:

1. The KL stanzas are excellent for pristine savings AND normal use for a particular KL.

2. When a user needs to maintain multiple versions of saves for a given/multiple KL's, he would need to interrupt a KL's Menu to direct the pathing of the multiple.

This is also true for FATDOGs (and DOGs in general).

The future document I've mentioned for "session management at boot-time" will describe, hopefully simply , the methods of session management options for ALL forum distros in separate sections of the upcoming doc. Thus, in one place for any user, one can know how sessions can be held in a good housekeeping manner.

Thanks, MUCHLY, @wiak for providing correction for any confusings my statement generated.

[wiak]

[*]When a user needs to maintain multiple versions of saves for a given/multiple KL's, he would need to interrupt a KL's Menu to direct the pathing of the multiple.[/list]

I don't think you are understanding what I am saying Clarity. When booting multiple different KL's from Ventory there is no need to interrupt the KL Menu to direct the save persistence path. That will be done automatically into either a "Persistence/Sessions" location in automatically created unique directory for each specific KL type (be that KLV, KLA, KLU and so on), or if menu choice save session to the Ventoy usb is chosen then similarly automatically into Sessions folder there - no menu interrupting or editing is involved - it just works.

[williwaw]

Composition of Ventoy
Ventoy is based on some great open source projects as follows. For these projects, some Ventoy modified their code, some used their binaries or libraries and some referenced their functions. Thanks to these great projects, Ventoy was born.
grub2
ipxe
Super-UEFIinSecureBoot-Disk
wimboot
edk2
efifs
exfat
libfuse
busybox
rufus
zlib
lz4
lzo
zstd
liblzma
XZ Embedded
squashfs-tools
vblade
fat_io_lib
FatFs
smalLZ4
device mapper
imdisk
7z
lunzip
tinycore
mini_gzip
libhttp
jquery
bootstrap
AdminLTE

https://www.ventoy.net/en/doc_composition.html

Ventoy injects code into your ISO's?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ventoy
Documentation about how Ventoy works could be better at the Ventoy site. Does Ventoy inject binaries into iso's?

[Clarity]

@williwaw do you have a Ventoy USB?

[williwaw]

I did at one time, but not at present.
Ventoy seems like a useful way to preview distros.
Considering that the app is basically a rootkit from China, is it prudent to use it as a loader for a daily driver?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38672112

[Clarity]

I did at one time, but not at present.
Ventoy seems like a useful way to preview distros.
Considering that the app is basically a rootkit from China, is it prudent to use it as a loader for a daily driver?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38672112

I AM not a conspiracy person. Just because a human lives in China (or anywhere else in the world), I dont condemn their efforts to partticipate with the rest of us humans, here on the forum.

The combined humanist idea is that WE, on the forum, are here for the good of Linux and PLDF.

Thus contributors from China/US/UK/Russia/France/Australia or anywhere else on the planet are seen here as equal members...hopefully.

P.S. My reason for asking that question of you, is because it appeared, to me, you may be unaware of how distros are launched and the effects that leads to a desktop.

There are 3 launchers discussed across the forum. They are ISObooter, SG2D and Ventoy. They are each designed to launch ISO files to desktop. So far, nothing nefarious has surfaced...to my knowledge.

I do appreciate that you are presenting info you think might be useful. And I thank you for that.

[fredx181]

Don't know if it's mentioned before already.
What I prefer is when setting up Ventoy on USB that some extra space is available to be able to create a new partition formatted with a Linux filesystem e.g. ext3, I ran "VentoyGUI.x86_64"
And did:

2024-04-05_16-09-20.gif (95.4 KiB) Viewed 385 times

(I made it 30G on my 64G USB stick)
After that I could create a third partition (with e.g. Gparted) ext3 or ext4 formatted and give it a label e.g. "Persistence" (which is what @Clarity proposed that on (some ?) modern Puppies it can be used from it's "loopback.cfg" (in the ISO) to point to a savefolder in folder "Sessions" created on that partition (edit: I think that the Kennel Linux projects have that mechanism working well already).
(but I don't know really the ins and outs, probably Clarity can explain better).
edit: if this is made to work properly to point to the savefolder, I'd say that Ventoy isn't "just" for trying out a distro ISO.

EDIT: Perhaps also nice to mention, I tried some hacking, by editing the grub.cfg in Ventoy for a "normal" frugal install and it works ok.
In the main Ventoy partition (VTOYEFI labeled for me) I added at the bottom of grub/grub.cfg :
(the UUID number is from that 'third' partition of mine, and copied my 'bwormp' folder to there (containing BookwormPup64 files))

Code: Select all

menuentry "bookwormpup 10.6 - Don't copy SFS files to RAM" {
insmod part_msdos 
insmod ext2
search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root e87446d0-d849-4253-be68-9513f3691540
    linux /bwormp/vmlinuz pfix=nocopy,fsck pmedia=usbflash psubdir=bwormp 
    initrd /bwormp/initrd.gz
}

And shows it below the ISO entries for me and boots fine (so just saying that Ventoy can be used also for booting a normal frugal install, not only for ISO'S (with some manual hacking )).

[wiak]

Don't know if it's mentioned before already.

Good having a gui for that Ventoy partitioning Fred, thanks.

However, you don't need to hack Ventoy to boot frugal installs. Ventoy itself made provision for that via a simple plugin which I described elsewhere:

viewtopic.php?p=110016#p110016

[fredx181]

Don't know if it's mentioned before already.

Good having a gui for that Ventoy partitioning Fred, thanks.

FYI. The one I downloaded is : https://sourceforge.net/projects/ventoy ... z/download , it has "VentoyGUI.x86_64" included.

However, you don't need to hack Ventoy to boot frugal installs. Ventoy itself made provision for that via a simple plugin which I described elsewhere:

viewtopic.php?p=110016#p110016

Ah, thanks, didn't know.
Btw, when you mentioned BOOTISOS folder sometimes when it's about Ventoy , it seems to me that you are confusing Ventoy with SG2D, SG2D works with folder BOOTISOS, Ventoy not , AFAIK.

[wiak]

Btw, when you mentioned BOOTISOS folder sometimes when it's about Ventoy , it seems to me that you are confusing Ventoy with SG2D, SG2D works with folder BOOTISOS, Ventoy not , AFAIK.

Yes, it comes from old SG2D, but Clarity asked for consistency in using same arrangement with Ventoy overall, so I obliged and use that location by default for Ventoy with KL distro bootings. In fact the FR initrd looks in all the SG2D places like /boot/boot-isos, but just a few lines of code and these other locations prob never used. But yes, not originally anything to do with Ventoy. Blame Clarity for me using it also for Ventoy convenience! Per latest FR initrd upload comments, KL/FR distros can put Ventoy persistence anywhere, overriding whatever grub suggests (by default, again per Clarity wishes, I use partition labelled "Persistence" and put the changes folder into directory "Sessions", but again the override mechanism available allows persistence saves anywhere at all on system).

[Clarity]

Yes, the SG2D is REQUIRED for modern WoofCE PUPs since 2019. As was shown when helping another member few days ago this need was apparent because the 2 ISO files he wanted to launch would NOT go to desktop allowing him to save the session when completed use of the distro.

When booting from Ventoy, the 2 issues result that have been reported as bugs: The boot device is locked when the system arrives at desktop AND there is no way for the PUP to find persistence even when the SAVESPEC is present along side the booting PUP ISO. Further, even when the PUP launched from Ventoy is guided using the psave= parm, the running system has locked the ISO partition negating a desire to want to remaster because the ISO is on the locked partition, or if you have newer versions of ISO files you cannot download them to the partition or if you want to peruse the partition to list its contents, the user cannot. This is probably the reason(s) why the KLs and the DOGs (and other distros outside of this forum) dont have these issues being launched from Ventoy.

SG2D is very unique and clever in what it does: It searches for a 'required' folder "BOOTISOS" and when found, it will list the ISO files contents for user selection. Every forum distro, in that folder boots and I have tested all WoofCE versions booting from SG2D. Thus, it is a failsafe when the WoofCE distro is hampered by the reports. Further, SG2D is unique in another way: It also will search other partitions to see if BOOTISOS folder are on them as well; if found it will list the contents from there, in addition, as well.

In a nutshell, I have shared the setup of a Ventoy disk, to have a BOOTISOS folder for keeping all ISOs because Ventoy has no problem listing every ISO it finds in that folder. And I have also shared that all users place an SG2D ISO/IMG there as well, in case they have a problem launching a forum distro to desktop from Ventoy.

Findings:

1. All DOGs and KLs when launched from the Ventoy list have no problems going to desktop. These ISO files, also, will boot to desktop if launched after starting the SG2D ISO file.

2. WoofCE PUPs are advised to continue booting by launching, first, the SG2D ISO, then from the SG2D list, choose one's PUP from its list. Expect that it will boot. If the SAVESPEC is present in the BOOTISOS folder, the PUP will use it for session management. AND, the boot partition will never be locked.

On some rare occasions, I have that a DOG/KL sometimes run into problems when launched from either. In those cases, I report the problem to the thread where the ISO is released. In all cases in the past, when this occurs, the develop fixes the boot problem when reported.

For me, the USB have proven their worth as I merely download and boot every ISO found. The ONLY forum distro OS contents that exist are located in the sessions folder. The distros do all the work and will save sessions in the Sessions folder. ALL sessions from EVERY forum distro are kept in the /Sessions folder on the Persistence partition. Thus when need, for all distros,I know where the booted distro's session is located...no matter the forum distro. And when booting any forum distro I know where the Sessions folder is located of a GRUB2 stanza needs a parm to steer (although stanza changing is rare in my case for any PUPs/KLs).

Its extremely simple once anyone gets over the initial setup of the USB. I have 2 USB that I use; one for test PCs and one for home use. One of them has about 50 forum distros, while the other has approx 100+ of forum and other live distros from Distrowatch collected over the past 5 years.

Users who use this method are not reporting issues with frugal setups, or issues with needs to change GRUB2 configs. They just, like myself, merely download and boot to desktop.

KLs are designed for consistency in this housekeeping of folders. On rare occasions, I might boot a KL with some of the parm options, that the developers show, as it may need a stanza change for the tests.

Lastly, for @fatdog ISO files, it is required to have a "savefile=" parm in its stanza to steer it to the Sessions folder for session management.

Hope this is reasonably easy to understand.

[Clarity]

The above explains in wordy way the reasons for:

1. Ventoy USB's "Ventoy" partition having a 'BOOTISOS' folder

2. Every PC to have a partition named "Persistence" with a folder named 'Sessions'

That all there is to what this is all about. It is laid-out to be an effortless use of forum distros allowing each to easily go to desktop immediately after downloading its ISO file.

Again, I have made this extremely simple. Any helpful findings would be welcomed and appreciated.

[fredx181]

Reported here: viewtopic.php?p=116191#p116191 ISO boot failure with KLV (kernel panic).
No idea if the problem has to do with Ventoy or/and with KLV.