The Linuxcare bootable business card always used ISOLINUX and it was very pleasant (as it could read ISO9660 filesystems to find various objects on them, such a

The Linuxcare bootable business card always used ISOLINUX and it was very pleasant (as it could read ISO9660 filesystems to find various objects on them, such as kernel and root filesystem images). I'm not positive what other systems used. I think LILO was less widely used on live CDs because BIOSes had trouble letting it access CD-ROMs. My recollection of the details of the exact problems with this has grown a little hazy, though. I think more modern systems are able to use GRUB in a relatively media-independent way, but I haven't followed this area enough to understand how GRUB is able to be so media-independent. CD-ROMs and some other boot media use something called the El Torito standard (https://wiki.osdev.org/El-Torito https://wiki.osdev.org/El-Torito), which is so named because a bunch of computer industry people -- I think in 1993 or 1994 or something? -- got together at a restaurant called El Torito to hash out the details. This describes how the BIOS can find the OS boot loader within the ISO9660 filesystem on the optical media. The tools for making an ISO9660 image had an option where you could indicate which file should be the El Torito special next-stage image, so I think we were supposed to indicate the ISOLINUX output this way, and it would get the right location (and maybe other metadata) so that the BIOS would be happy to boot it. El Torito support in BIOSes was surprisingly universal considering how relatively unofficial a standard it was. In particular, ISO9660 was published by the ISO as a work product of a formal committee, while the El Torito extension was, I think, just some people who met at a restaurant this one time! Edit: 1994 in Irvine, CA, apparently, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_9660#El_Torito; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_9660#El_Torito; if the coordinates in the article are to be believed, the restaurant is still there, at Main and Mercantile, literally right across the street from SNA airport. Which might, in turn, be the reason they picked that restaurant?