ISObooter3

[rcrsn51]

Here is the difference between BIOS and UEFI booting.

With BIOS, Grub4Dos exposes the contents of the ISO via the "phantom" partition sdb4. So your "w_bootfrom=/mnt/sdb4" works.

But with UEFI's GRUB2, that mechanism does not exist. So you need to expose the SFS files by copying them to the PuppySFS folder (or whatever you want to call it).

Recent Puppies handle this via the "find_iso" boot argument. So the Init can mount the ISO and locate its SFS files without needing extra help.

Porteus booting has the easiest way. Just name the ISO file in the "from=" argument.

[vtpup]

I feel pressured so I'm skipping doing a major security fix to the Puppy Wiki and run these tests.............NO ONE does anything with the Wiki and I really don't know why I am investing the time in fixing and maintaining a WIki.....since no one EVER reports

Sorry to hear that Rockedge, I hadn't thought about it. I think I tried a long time ago to add comments (back in the old forumdays) and couldn't. Anyway, so thinking to try it today, and write something about Remmina I opened that section up, and there were no comments, so I clicked on Login/Register, and first tried a recovery for old password under vtpup. It reported no such user. So I looked to try to do a new registration and I only got this screen again, which doesn't seem to have a place for registering:

PupWikiRegisterPage.png (26.13 KiB) Viewed 2835 times

[rockedge]

@vtpup All better now. I activated the register user mechanism!

Please set yourself up and let me know and I will shut new registration down again until I can add a question+answer safety switch to slow down spam bots

[vtpup]

Done, Rockedge!

[bigpup]

Meanwhile, not a single community member who downloaded ISObooter has shown the courtesy to report if the new version works for them.

I started to download and use it and report back what happened.

But you removed the link to the download of ISObooter!

Now you say look here:
Board Index > Dog House > DebianDogs > The Debian-Live Bullseye Starter Kit > The Debian-Live Multi Installer

Where in those 34 pages of posts??

[rcrsn51]

I started to download and use it and report back what happened.

But you removed the link to the download of ISObooter!

It's exactly where the first post in this thread says it is. The "Debian-Live Multi Installer" is a single post.

I'm tired of this. In my current medical condition, I should not be doing this.

[rockedge]

@rcrsn51 Sorry about the hassle. I hope you feel better, is there anything we can do to help?

I am about to test ISObooter with some other stanza's and look into adding a find_iso() type function

So far the ISObooter is performing well in the preliminary tests and is easy to use. I've been typing on the forum most of the day so far using a booted KLV ISO on a 4 GB USB thumb drive.

[bigpup]

YES!
Sorry to hear you are having medical issues!
Hope you get to feeling better soon!!

Tried ISO booter with Fossapup64 9.5 and Imppup64 9.6.1 with their iso's installed on a USB.

Seem to be booting OK and making a save folder on shutdown.
Placing the save folder on the 2nd partition.

One step that I did not do:

4. Copy some ISO's to the fat32 partition. Run the "sync" command after each ISO.

I did not do this sync step, mainly because I had no idea how to do it.

But it seemed to not affect the install.
When I started the ISObooter script.
It said it was doing this sync thing.
Took some time, just sitting there with this message displayed about syncing.
But seemed to finish what it was doing.
Went to showing the next message, in the process, and all yes/no selections.
Script finished.
Seemed to do what it was suppose to do.

When I setup the USB drive using Gparted.
Made two partitions.
1st fat32 and 2nd ext 3 format.
Used half the drive for each one.

Running Fossapu64 9.5 (from an install on a different drive, not the ISObooter one) and looking at the desktop drive icons for this USB.
It is showing 3 partition icons.
sdc1, sdc2, sdc4
.

Screenshot(2).jpg (32.38 KiB) Viewed 2763 times

.
The first two look normal for what they are.
sdc4 identifies as a CDROM
Click on it and it displays what is in the imppup iso.
.

Screenshot(1).jpg (32.89 KiB) Viewed 2763 times

.
.

[rockedge]

I did not do this sync step, mainly because I had no idea how to do it.

To do this step simply open a terminal in Rox after copying the ISO file and type:

Code: Select all

sync

The sync command in Linux is used to synchronize cached writes to persistent storage. This insures that the copy is really complete.

[bigpup]

Thanks for the info on sync!

Now I and everyone that is not that knowledgeable on Linux commands and when and where to use them know.

[rockedge]

@bigpup The sync command is really important with writes to USB drives to insure that all of the data is properly written to the USB drive before unmounting and or ejection of that device.

[rockedge]

@rcrsn51 So far using ISObooter is a breeze and after I saw how to best write the boot stanza's for my use case it has worked flawlessly.

I still prefer just making frugal installs manually in most cases, BUT for UEFI finicky machines it seems ISObooter is a good way to get Puppy or KLV going from a USB drive. Or for a solid and easy method to have more than one distro available on one usb thumb drive.

I like ISObooter much better than Ventoy because it is such a straightforward setup to get going.

[geo_c]

@rcrsn51 So far using ISObooter is a breeze and after I saw how to best write the boot stanza's for my use case it has worked flawlessly.

I still prefer just making frugal installs manually in most cases, BUT for UEFI finicky machines it seems ISObooter is a good way to get Puppy or KLV going from a USB drive. Or for a solid and easy method to have more than one distro available on one usb thumb drive.

I like ISObooter much better than Ventoy because it is such a straightforward setup to get going.

Well now, I just so happened to visit Best Buy today, I and picked up a 512GB PNY USB.3.1 thumb drive. That's bigger than each and every internal hard drive I own, and this thumb drive is a sturdy metal construction.

I'm looking at all these iso files that I have sitting on an SG2D thumb drive and thinking, "What is the best method to install: bionicpup32-8.0+29-uefi, bionicpup64-8.0-uefi, Fatdog64-811, fossapup64-9.5, jackalpup-0.0_RC2, KLV-Airedale-beta20, LxPupSc64-22.02+2-T, ScPup64-22.02+0-T, stretch-7.5-uefi-k4.19.56, TinyCorePure64-12.0, vanilladpup-9.2.8, VoidPup64-22.02+4, and anything else I feel like downloading?

I never got the uefi distros to boot from SG2D, and I'm not so crazy about that method, or uefi for that matter. I've been running all my machines with legacy boot. So honestly, I think the best way to go about it, since this USB stick I just bought is so big, why not just extract them all and run grub4dos on the drive?

Seems like that should work well, and the beautiful thing about bootable USB drives, is once the operating system is booted, it can be easily installed on the internal drive.

edit: Of course I realize that the distros labeled uefi probably need to be booted using it.

[Rantanplan]

Hello @rcrsn51 ,

I just used Isobooter. I followed your procedure and everything is fine On the usb key, I copied:
antiX21,
antiX22,
Slitaz Rolling,
Triton 6.0 by petihar,
SO 32 bit Focal Fossa PAE
and Toutou linux Slaxen 6.0
Apart from Toutou linux, everything works very well.

With all my thanks for isobooter and all these things you do for us.

Friendships.

==============in french, my native language===============
Bonjour rcrsn51,

Je viens juste d'utiliser Isobooter.

J'ai suivi votre procédure et tout va bien.

Sur la clé usb, j'ai copié :
antiX21,
antiX22,
Slitaz Rolling,
Triton 6.0 de petihar,
SO 32 bits Focal Fossa PAE
et Toutou linux Slaxen 6.0

À part Toutou linux, tout fonctionne très bien.

Avec tous mes remerciements pour isobooter et toutes ces choses que vous faites pour nous.

Amitiés.

[rcrsn51]

ISObooter3 updated with an option that automatically adds the new menu entries to the grub.cfg files. See page 1.

[Flash]

Meanwhile, not a single community member who downloaded ISObooter has shown the courtesy to report if the new version works for them.

That is par for the course quite often. I have had 101 downloads of pupit.sh and no one has ever commented one way or the other about it
I presume it must work or be useful to some, or the opposite...-> proved to be a worthless download. What does it matter?

I release weedogit.sh so often the download counter falls to zero everytime I do that. But overall it has had literally many hundreds of downloads in its relatively short life, albeit probably often by the same multi-dozen people, but maybe only around half a dozen who ever downloaded it ever reported back about it at all (was useful sometimes the ones who did admittedly). I really don't find open source community is a place to regularly get much feedback, and certainly not much in proportion to the number of downloads that may occur. I tend to take the number of downloads as the feedback... If something keeps getting downloaded it must be proving useful to somebody (maybe...) - not a perfect situation in terms of encouraging further development, but that is just how it is. To be fair, no one asked me to upload anything I developed and use myself anyway, so only reason they should consider giving feedback is that it makes further development much more likely - and especially development that may address any extras/fixes they might like to see happen. If you need feedback as a condition of contributing something for potential use, and you don't get it, you should consider not uploading at all (rather than withdrawing what was already posted?).

Perhaps developers of AI projects are downloading every bit of free code they find on the Internet?

[fredx181]

Perhaps developers of AI projects are downloading every bit of free code they find on the Internet?

Sure! And absolute first priority is to learn everything about Puppy Linux !

[rockedge]

@rcrsn51 Downloaded ISObooter3 and installed it on 4 G flash drive split into 2 partitions. FAT32 (LABEL=BOOTSYS) and ext4 (LABEL=KLVSYS) around 2 G in size each.
ISObooter3 and KLV-mini-C.iso is on the FAT32.

grub2 menu entry worked well and looks like this ->

Code: Select all

menuentry "KLV-mini-C.iso" {
  echo "Booting ..."
  set isopath=/KLV-mini-C.iso
  search --no-floppy --file --set=root $isopath
  loopback loop $isopath
  set root=(loop)
  linux (loop)/vmlinuz w_bootfrom=$isopath w_changes=/mnt/sdb2
  initrd (loop)/initrd.gz
}

Although to test for a more generic approach to configuring the save partition I tried this combination which did work smoothly ->

Code: Select all

menuentry "KLV-mini-C.iso" {
  echo "Booting ..."
  set isopath=/KLV-mini-C.iso
  search --no-floppy --file --set=root $isopath
  loopback loop $isopath
  set root=(loop)
  linux (loop)/vmlinuz w_bootfrom=$isopath w_changes=LABEL=KLVSYS=/
  initrd (loop)/initrd.gz
}

I feel that most, if not all of the Kennel Linux type disto ISO's will boot successfully and have the expected persistence using ISObooter3

[wiak]

@rcrsn51 Downloaded ISObooter3 and installed it on 4 G flash drive split into 2 partitions. FAT32 (LABEL=BOOTSYS) and ext4 (LABEL=KLVSYS) around 2 G in size each.
ISObooter3 and KLV-mini-C.iso is on the FAT32.

Although to test for a more generic approach to configuring the save partition I tried this combination which did work smoothly ->

Code: Select all

menuentry "KLV-mini-C.iso" {
  echo "Booting ..."
  set isopath=/KLV-mini-C.iso
  search --no-floppy --file --set=root $isopath
  loopback loop $isopath
  set root=(loop)
  linux (loop)/vmlinuz w_bootfrom=$isopath w_changes=LABEL=KLVSYS=/
  initrd (loop)/initrd.gz
}

I feel that most, if not all of the Kennel Linux type disto ISO's will boot successfully and have the expected persistence using ISObooter3

I haven't tried ISObooter3, but from above I would think the following would also work in more general purpose way (alter distname, revision, savepart (LABEL name): I put Persistence but could be KLVSYS if that's where you wish, and savedir as needed/appropriate):

Code: Select all

menuentry "KLV-mini-C.iso" {
  echo "Booting ..."
  set isopath=/KLV-mini-C.iso
  set distname=KLV-mini-C
  set revision=1.0
  set savepart=Persistence
  set savedir=Sessions
  search --no-floppy --file --set=root $isopath
  loopback loop $isopath
  set root=(loop)
  linux (loop)/vmlinuz  w_bootfrom=$isopath w_changes=LABEL=${savepart}=/${savedir}/${distname}-${revision} w_changes1=RAM2
  initrd (loop)/initrd.gz
}

Above for save-on-demand (w_changes=RAM2 mode, but can change that to w_changes1="" direct saves if you prefer).
All going well, that more general purpose one should find the LABEL(LED) partition wherever it is on the system so doesn't need to be on the usb stick itself (but can be). UUID method also provided in Kennel Linux HowTo: viewtopic.php?p=97641#p97641