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

[tosim]

Thanks for that link to the old forum.

[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).

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[Feek]

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)... ?

[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!

[Feek]

Thanks for your reply.

I will play with it on another usb stick

[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?

[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.

[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.

[wiak]

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).

[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'.