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Why I stopped releasing EasyOS as an ISO file

127 pointsby g0xA52A2Aover 3 years ago

26 comments

cesarbover 3 years ago
&gt; Oh yes, there are some old computers that won&#x27;t boot from USB<p>Back in the day, there were some old computers that wouldn&#x27;t boot from a <i>CD</i> drive. I recall that the solution back then was very simple: within the ISO image, there was a <i>bootable floppy</i> image, which you could write to a normal floppy disk (actualy, there were IIRC usually two such images, one for 1.44 floppy drives, and another for the older 1.2 floppy drives). You would boot and load the kernel from that floppy, but the installer would look for the rest of the files on the CD drive.<p>The same idea could be used here: for those old computers which have a BIOS which do not understand how to boot from a USB drive, a small bootable CD image containing only the bootloader and the kernel could be made available, either within the USB image or as a separate download.
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satysinover 3 years ago
Somewhat related… for a while now Microsoft have provided publicly downloadable iso images for Windows 10 that you can’t image to a usb drive without needing special EFI NTFS software from a third party which in turn requires disabling secure boot (as it’s not secure boot signed)<p>Why you may ask? Simply because the iso contains a file larger than 4GB (install.wim) so you cannot use a FAT32 formatted usb drive (FAT32 is needed for EFI boot). Instead tools like Rufus provide their own EFI NTFS boot loader.<p>Interestingly Microsoft’s own usb creator doesn’t include install.wim but instead install.esd which is less than 4GB so can use FAT32. I have no idea why the iso uses a wim file whereas the windows usb creator uses an esd file. I do know the esd version is a little slower to install (only a minute or two). I guess because of higher compression.<p>This is a pain because making a Windows bootable installer on Linux or macOS is now more complicated than it need be as you cannot simply put the iso onto the usb drive with dd or gdisk as you would normally do.<p>Does anyone know why this is the case? As a workaround you can use Microsoft’s usb media creator to build an iso with the esd file then use dd as usual. But of course this requires a Windows system to run the Windows only usb creation tool and is a slower process than just downloading an iso directly. Annoying.
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mhioover 3 years ago
I haven&#x27;t touched a physical optical drive in many years, but I still use ISO&#x27;s regularly for building virtual machine images or booting servers into something quickly. I can get away with plain pxe&#x2F;netboot for distro&#x27;s I&#x27;m familiar with the packaging of but an ISO is the distro packaging unit I know that will work wherever it is needed.<p>EasyOS might be targeted elsewhere? Compared to say debian&#x2F;ubuntu&#x2F;rhel
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MilStdJunkieover 3 years ago
I ran headfirst into this &quot;non-writeable&quot; business a few years back. For what I was doing, though, I went straight into the virtualization thing, which seems awful popular with the kids these days.<p>Forensics still needs the stick, though, although I am sure one of my grandkids knows some super secret trick that does the same thing in half the time&#x2F;money.<p>Also, add me to the queue of people who were jazzed about an article detailing someone walking away from ISO specifications. I&#x27;ve lost count of the ISO &quot;specifications&quot; that turned out to be nothing more than freeways into the garage of a sole-source vendor who &quot;maintains&quot; some archaic file specification that apparently I can&#x27;t do without. And who runs the Working Group. Fancy that! What a co-inky-dink.<p>And AS9100 governance has gone from &quot;middling poor&quot; to &quot;cannonball dive into the thunder pot&quot; during the course of my professional career, now flirting with &quot;outright extortion&quot; . Now, I do realize AS9100 is SAE and not ISO proper, but a ton of the bad stuff is coming straight from old ISO hands either in their original chairs or having moved around to SAE or IAQG.
birdman3131over 3 years ago
I have to say the reason I still want an iso is at least I have a much higher guarantee it will work. I just spent about 4 hours this week trying to get clonezilla to boot from usb and could not get it to work. EFi. Legacy. Everything I could think of. And this was on a reasonably modern server (2015&#x2F;16 ish lenovo with a e3-1270 V5 )<p>Come to find out it was the fact that it was a usb 3.0 flash drive. Grabbed a 2.0 drive and everything worked fine.<p>Had I had a dvd burner (Ironically the computer in question did have one but it was not useable till i fixed it.) I would have saved myself significant amounts of time. (Or randomly grabbed a crappier flash drive.)
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captainmuonover 3 years ago
I have the opposite experience wrt. ISOs and plain (dd) images. If I burn an ISO to a USB stick, I can use the whole stick. But if I burn a dd image to the stick, the size must match exactly, otherwise I have to futz around with fdisk and resize2fs. Sometimes a 4GB stick has less memory than another 4GB stick, so you can&#x27;t restore.<p>And when creating images, you have to take extra care to zero out unused space, otherwise your dd image will not be compressible.<p>Frankly I just want a small file that I can right-click or drag into Rufus and burn my USB stick or SD card ASAP. I used to know exactly what was going on when making a bootable floppy; the file containing the bootloader had to be in certain sectors, so you had to create it with FORMAT, but all other files could just be copied on. I don&#x27;t know if any special sector layout is neccessary nowadays, I think for EFI boot it just requires the EFI directory. And tools like Rufus probably just copy file by file to the USB drive, not sector wise.
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guerrillaover 3 years ago
&gt; Despite very careful instruction, and even writing down simple steps to make a call, etc., I could see her eyes glazing over. She just didn&#x27;t want to know, and after awhile I had to buy her another keyboard flip-phone.<p>I feel like I&#x27;m already getting there with some things and I&#x27;m half that age. If something as disruptive as systemd or GNOME 3 came out again, I think I wouldn&#x27;t even listen to the rationales and just follow the old fork this time around. Things work as they are for me.
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xxporover 3 years ago
For those that don&#x27;t even want to download and dd to a usb stick any more (or only do it once!), check out <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;netboot.xyz&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;netboot.xyz&#x2F;</a>. I&#x27;ve actually gone ahead and flashed it over my network card&#x27;s stock PXE booter, and so now booting into a live image to fix something is completely trivial.
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zamadatixover 3 years ago
&gt; There are some multi-boot tools, that enable putting many ISO files on the one USB-stick. I have never used them, and don&#x27;t see the point of them, unless you are a crazed disto-hopper.<p>If the author had taken a bit of their own advice and went out of their comfort zone they might not have been having so many issues finding where to put the save file years ago! Overall though I get it and image distribution is easier for 99% of cases. I have found it more difficult in 2 cases though, both are cases of &quot;the tooling knows ISO&quot;.<p>The first is on IP KVM&#x27;s, even when they support non-ISO based virtual drives you&#x27;ll often be wishing they did. The last I remember trying to futz with this was a Lantronix Spider and it wanted to pass through an entire drive letter but it wasn&#x27;t working for whatever reason and I eventually just made an ISO with the files in it and mounted the file with 2 clicks.<p>The second is virtual machines with a similar story but this time it&#x27;s usually possible to qemu-convert or extract and put into a virtual disk of the right format and you&#x27;re good to mount the disk - or maybe you get lucky and the packaged format is just a click or config line away from natively mounting like assigning an ISO to a virtual CD drive is. A good example of the latter was just today I wanted to boot a live Linux environment to run gparted on an existing guest VM on an M1 Mac Parallel&#x27;s guest. I had 0 knowledge (or desire) to investigate how to get an ARM64 image of my preferred distro to be in whatever format Parallel&#x27;s expects just to use for 5 minutes then never use that virtual disk again so I found Fedora shipped ARM64 ISOs and was able to easily mount it with a few clicks in the GUI and do my work.<p>I don&#x27;t think either of these are at the forefront of Puppy&#x27;s use cases but worth mentioning in a universal call to retire ISO. It may be an old hodge-podge at this point but most everything understands how to work with it as boot media already vs whatever disk image format you choose instead.
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mmphosisover 3 years ago
Hello, yes I am a crazed disto-hopper.<p>Booting a PC is a &quot;dogs breakfast.&quot; I like the name &quot;EasyOS&quot; and I just wish booting a PC OS was easy, but it&#x27;s not.<p>I boot my daily driver off of a camera card.<p>I also multi-boot.<p>I can net boot.<p>I can still burn CDs and DVDs, but would rather not.<p>I have a 3 1&#x2F;2 inch drive that connects thru USB in a drawer somewhere.<p>If it was up to me (and it&#x27;s not): I would have many memory cards that could be set to Read-Only by physically flipping a tab just like on an old 3 1&#x2F;2 floppy. The code in fast memory on the memory card starts from an open standard address, a documented place that is absolutely the first and only code that runs when the computer is powered on. The read-only OS is already in memory and running and there is no such thing as boot time. I press the power on switch, and the OS is running instantaneously.
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pizza234over 3 years ago
The solution is to simply use a live usb tool, which creates a usable partition in the rest of the device. There are plenty, for example, dus.<p>It seems that the developer isn&#x27;t aware of this, indeed they developer were using something similar:<p>&gt; For Linux developers, if you are interested, I have a script for creating a skeleton drive-image file, with a boot-partition and a working-partition, that will boot on either a legacy-BIOS or a modern UEFI PC. There are three scripts, &#x27;2createpcskeletonimage&#x27;, &#x27;2createpcskeletonimage-encrypt&#x27; and &#x27;2createpcskeletonimage-gpt&#x27; -- for easyOS I currently use the middle one, which creates a MSDOS partition table and enables ext4 fscrypt in the working-partition. Syslinux is used for legacy-BIOS booting, rEFInd for UEFI booting. These scripts are in the woofQ tarball, available here.
Animatsover 3 years ago
There&#x27;s something to be said from being able to boot from a read-only medium.
jaclazover 3 years ago
Unfortunately one of the most clever devices around is rather uncommon the Iodd&#x2F;Zalman thingy (only for the record), this should be latest version:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zalman.com&#x2F;EN&#x2F;Product&#x2F;ProductDetail.do?pageIndex=1&amp;pageSize=10&amp;pageUnit=12&amp;productSeq=904" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zalman.com&#x2F;EN&#x2F;Product&#x2F;ProductDetail.do?pageIndex...</a><p>basically these devices are external USB hard disks that can expose a .iso saved inside (selectable among many) as a CD&#x2F;DVD.
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tomc1985over 3 years ago
I agree with this guy fully (having been professionally bitten by exactly what he describes and also having to innovate a way around it) but casually dismissing old-timers and old-school ways of doing thing reeks of ageism and needs to be stopped. Grow up, folks.<p>In fact this entire culture of lambasting old stuff would be better off being taken out back and shot.
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trissylegsover 3 years ago
For windows boot disks the ISO contains files too big for fat32. They are splitable archives. but it&#x27;s a pain in the ass.
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scblockover 3 years ago
This isn&#x27;t that uncommon and doesn&#x27;t seem like a big deal at first thought. I do appreciate the author going over the (unexpected) issues he found related to moving away from the use of ISOs, as I hadn&#x27;t considered them.<p>While not the same as a general purpose OS image, all the major audio Linux distributions I&#x27;ve used (Volumio, moOde, piCorePlayer), which are intended for use on Raspberry Pi or other embedded systems, ship this way rather than as ISOs, and support resizing the OS partition to take the rest of the micro SD card for music storage or anything else. A similar approach for an OS on a bootable USB drive seems very reasonable.<p>Incidentally, the last time I installed an OS from a CD or DVD was Windows 7 in 2016. Everything since then has been a USB stick, a micro SD card, or a micro SD card in a USB card reader.
MarkSweepover 3 years ago
One place where it is still helpful to have ISO images is when creating Hyper-V VMs. You can only attach ISOs or VHDs to virtual machines. So a raw thumb drive image would need converting before it is possible to use.
m-p-3over 3 years ago
&gt; There are some multi-boot tools, that enable putting many ISO files on the one USB-stick. I have never used them, and don&#x27;t see the point of them, unless you are a crazed disto-hopper.<p>I use Ventoy specifically to avoid the issue the article describes with standard ISOs file where it leaves the rest of the USB storage unused.<p>That way I can carry and easily update a bunch of installable ISOs on a single USB thumbdrive, just in case I need to install a specific OS from scratch (Ubuntu, Windows, etc) or launch a live recovery environment (SystemRescue, GParted Live, etc).
dcowover 3 years ago
Isn’t there an easy compromise for old timers: utility that converts drive image to ISO linked from a footnote on the download page?
Koiwaiover 3 years ago
I always find ISO9660 being abbreviated to ISO very amusing.
0desover 3 years ago
The usable space part of drive images vs iso made the case for me. Those illustrations really drove the point home. Consider me converted!
Jaruzelover 3 years ago
Totally wasn&#x27;t expecting that reference to Silicon Heaven, that made my morning :D
nyuszika7hover 3 years ago
Looking at it are a lot more questionable things about EasyOS than dropping ISOs. For a distribution that claims to be &quot;easy&quot; it makes even my head hurt as a power user, I can&#x27;t imagine it being easy for the average user.<p>&gt; This is controversial, however, it is just a different philosophy. The user runs as administrator (root), apps may optionally run as user &#x27;spot&#x27; or in containers as a &quot;crippled root&quot; or user &#x27;zeus&#x27;. The practical outcome is that you never have to type &quot;sudo&quot; or &quot;su&quot; to run anything, nor get hung up with file permissions.<p>This is a horrible idea. It&#x27;s not a &quot;different philosophy&quot;, it&#x27;s just incredibly dumb and insecure, especially if you&#x27;re trying to market your distro to the average user. It&#x27;s even worse than Windows. Using this logic, why don&#x27;t they do `chmod -R 777 &#x2F;` then? See how ridiculous that sounds? Exactly my point.<p>They&#x27;re basically just doing some buzzword marketing by saying &quot;we support containers!&quot; but it doesn&#x27;t say if any services <i>actually</i> run in containers by default. And even if they do, the default setup is still extremely insecure, making users run every command as root by default.<p>&gt; No systemd, and it is also worth noting what else Easy does not have: policykit, pam, pulseaudio, avahi. The Dunfell-series doesn&#x27;t have the Qt libraries, but that may change.<p>I can understand not having systemd, for me it&#x27;s both a blessing and a curse. But the lack of PAM will break a lot of things like Google Authenticator&#x2F;TOTP and YubiKey support. Arguably, most average users won&#x27;t need those (though IMO 2FA should be more normalized), but then again as I&#x27;ve already said the &quot;EasyOS&quot; name seems to be self-contradictory, demanding a bunch of things that power users may be fine with but average users will just get confused by.<p>&gt; When someone boots up Easy, they will see that the menu (bottom-left of screen) is totally different from what they are accustomed to. Ditto the folder hierarchy. The thing is, keep an open mind -- it is very easy to adjust, and there are solid reasons for the differences.<p>Again, if you&#x27;re trying to market to the average user this is nonsensical and just serves to confuse them even more. Sure, power users may be able to adjust more easily, but then don&#x27;t call it &quot;EasyOS&quot;.<p>&gt; Ditto. The kernel-assigned names for drives and partitions are retained. For example drive sda and partition sda1.<p>Which distribution actually does this? I&#x27;m aware of it being done for network interfaces, but I haven&#x27;t seen such a thing for drive names yet. (That said, I do believe that the new &quot;predictable&quot; network interface names are stupid and just cause more issues than they solve. Maybe it works well to ensure consistency if you have two network cards, but the whole thing falls apart as soon as you change the hardware.)
puskaviover 3 years ago
ventoy FTW
zinekellerover 3 years ago
This is the one time that the title is <i>very</i> ambiguous that I&#x27;ll clarify what are they talking about. This is about ISO boot files on EasyOS, but if you didn&#x27;t read the article you could read it as ISO the organisation or a particular specification issued or co-issued by ISO.
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richardfeyover 3 years ago
&gt; What I have observed is that those persistent individuals are Puppy old-timers, very old-timers. A couple of them are in their 80s, and they have a collection of vintage PCs, all with optical drives. Optical media, CD&#x2F;DVD, ISO files, that&#x27;s what they know. And they ain&#x27;t gonna change.<p>Hold on a sec...so the conclusion is: screw those old timers?
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