this post was submitted on 01 Mar 2024
26 points (90.6% liked)

Open Source

31719 readers
105 users here now

All about open source! Feel free to ask questions, and share news, and interesting stuff!

Useful Links

Rules

Related Communities

Community icon from opensource.org, but we are not affiliated with them.

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Not sure if it fits what you're looking for but I usually use YUMI for multi boot situations, can't recall it giving me any issues over the years. But I don't do anything overly complex either.

Never had the need to use Ventoy myself so can't really give a good comparison but maybe others have used both & can give a better review.

PS - For what it's worth my basic toolkit is YUMI with https://www.system-rescue.org and https://www.memtest.org, that alone covers the vast majority of my diagnostics/rescue situations. But I've also added Windows 10 ISO onto the multi boot on occasion which could be useful for getting to a Windows prompt with Windows tools when needed - though I have a habit of keeping Windows on its own USB via https://rufus.ie