GitHub - fnr1r/ventoy-meta
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Posting this since quite a bit has changed since I last posted about this on [email protected].

Here’s a rough breakdown of the current status:

  • shared Ventoy components: build and seem to work, needs more testing
    • grub / menu - builds
    • EDK II apps / UEFI chainloader and more - builds
    • iPXE / BIOS chainloader - builds, with fixes for newer toolchains
    • ISO9660 and UDF drivers - TODO
  • Ventoy CPIO / Linux ramdisk: builds; I deemed musl xzcat unneeded, so I skipped it; needs more testing
  • wimboot / Windows chainloader (?) - stalled, I lack the necessary knowledge to work on it
  • geom-ventoy / FreeBSD disk mapping kernel module - is being worked on, slowly; not ready for testing
  • anything else is a TODO

This should be enough to boot Linux with just what’s built manually, but I haven’t tried that yet.

Secure Boot is just done by using a pre-built bypass package. I’ll deal with that later.

Having more people testing this would be nice. :)

Cheers

  • eneff@discuss.tchncs.de
    18·
    1 year ago

    Thank you for your work on this! It’s highly appreciated!

    I’m about as broke as it gets currently, but are there ways to send money your way in case someone who’s able to comes across this?

  • Ludrol@szmer.info
    18·
    1 year ago

    Thanks for the thankless work. I hope that the changes will be accepted upstream.

  • balsoft@lemmy.ml
    7·
    1 year ago

    Are there any instructions on how to build this all to get the ventoy installer binary that can replace upstream? Or is the project not up to this stage yet? I can go without Windows and FreeBSD support.

    • fnrir@lemmy.blahaj.zoneOP
      3·
      1 year ago

      On Linux installation is done through a series of scripts and vtoycli. I haven’t worked on that yet, but there’s build scripts there that should do the trick, but since they build it for multiple architectures, you’ll have to run just the stuff for your arch (probably x86_64).

      sth like:

      cd vtoycli/fat_io_lib/release
gcc -specs "/usr/local/musl/lib/musl-gcc.specs" -O2 -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 fat*.c -c
ar -rc libfat_io_64.a *.o
cd ../..
gcc -specs "/usr/local/musl/lib/musl-gcc.specs" -Os -static -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 -Ifat_io_lib/include fat_io_lib/lib/libfat_io_64.a *.c -o vtoycli_64
# Optional
strip --strip-all vtoycli_64
      • balsoft@lemmy.ml
        3·
        1 year ago

        Do I have to build all other parts myself before then? (I’m trying to package it for Nix so that other people can also build it more easily)

        • fnrir@lemmy.blahaj.zoneOP
          2·
          1 year ago

          Pretty much. I do have some releases, but considering Nix’s philosophy you probably should. Ventoy-CPIO should build fine, if the right toolchains and dietlibc are in PATH. Ventoy-boot relies on overlay mounts though, so it might not build within Nix.

  • koala@programming.dev
    3·
    1 year ago

    I’m still a huge fan of Ventoy, but lately I have been finding more and more issues with it.

    So I decided to investigate using a Raspberry Pi Zero with a USB adapter to create a virtual drive:

    https://github.com/alexpdp7/alexpdp7/blob/master/hardware/using-an-rpi-zero-as-an-usb-drive-to-install-operating-systems.md

    It’s very wonky and manual at the moment, but I have managed to boot all Linux ISOs successfully so far. Unfortunately, I think only ISOhybrid works OOB, so Windows ISO do not work. I have found some scripts to take Windows ISO and make them ISOhybrid, but haven’t gotten around to doing that yet.

    I think it should be doable to package this nicely.

  • CrypticCoffee@lemm.eeEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    Credit to you. Many complained, but you went out of your way to solve the problems. The output here has real value. Thanks.