GitHub - fnr1r/ventoy-meta
github.com
Contribute to fnr1r/ventoy-meta development by creating an account on GitHub.

Posting this since quite a bit has changed since I last posted about this on !technology@lemmy.world.

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

    • fnrir@lemmy.blahaj.zoneOP
      1·
      1 hour ago

      Interesting. Sadly it only supports FAT32, NTFS and EXFAT with no Linux filesystems.
      And Ventoy is free. It’s hard to argue with free.

    • pogmommy@lemmy.mlEnglish
      1·
      1 hour ago

      Yeah, bought the st300 after having repeated issues with ventoy not properly mounting disk images causing multiple Linux distro installs to fail. My st300 might be one of my best investments as a technician just for how seamless and simple it is to use.

  • balsoft@lemmy.ml
    5·
    6 hours 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
      2·
      5 hours 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
        2·
        5 hours 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
          1·
          5 hours 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.

  • Ludrol@szmer.info
    9·
    7 hours ago

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

    • electric_nan@lemmy.ml
      1·
      2 hours ago

      Can you use dd to create multiboot USB drives? Even the link you shared lists Ventoy as an option.

  • eneff@discuss.tchncs.de
    16·
    23 hours 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?