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

  • @orris
    2•10 months ago

    If you have some spare cash you can look at IODD or Zalman (white label iodd) devices. USB disk drives that also emulate an optical disk drive and mount ISOs.

    I bought a Zalman back over a decade ago, still have and use it to this day. Used the daily in at data centres. Bees knees. Looking at the IODD devices now for the USBC port, but the Zalman is still working flawlessly.