4 ms·

Why buy this unnecessary gadget when Ventoy exists? Most clever? That product page looks like satire. EDIT: sold for £130+. Incredible.

Scramblejams 5y ago
Ventoy gave me plenty of trouble. I guess I have a lot of hardware it doesn’t like. Meanwhile, my iodd just works. For me it was worth it to end the hassle.
jaclaz 5y ago
Ventoy is a very good software solution, and not the only one[1], we have also Easy2boot and - for the more technical ones - also "plain" grub4dos/grub4UEFI. The (very high) price is due - I believe - to the very small amount that they are made, but it doesn't seem (to me) like "rocket science", the basic idea is the same as those floppy disk replacements wherre you can select the floppy image to run/boot. Some years ago there was a USB stick that had the same capabilities (also expensive as it was almost hand made) called isostick and before that a SD card reader with the same capabilities, simply for some reasons the idea didn't become popular/ubiquitous. [1] and BTW it has some limits and compatibility issues
captainmuon 5y ago
I could imagine this being useful for our company. We need to provision the computers we make. Currently somebody runs to them and boots them with a USB stick or via PXE, or we clone the disks. But it gets cumbersome to manage all the sticks, and cloning is difficult if the device is provisioned in a different factory than where it is assembled. PXE is good for managing the images, but we need to connect a keyboard to start the installation (even though most PCs have touchscreens, but PXELinux doesn't support touch AFAIK). (I had the idea to install a panel where you could preselect which image gets sent to which "PXE cable", but we rejected that as too cumbersome.) It would be great to have a thingedy that you plug in and that can serve one of multiple ISOs to a device. (Even better if it could emulate a keyboard and automatically go into the BIOS to make the right settings, but I guess such a device would be a security hazard...)

Scramblejams 5y ago

Ventoy gave me plenty of trouble. I guess I have a lot of hardware it doesn’t like. Meanwhile, my iodd just works. For me it was worth it to end the hassle.

jaclaz 5y ago

Ventoy is a very good software solution, and not the only one[1], we have also Easy2boot and - for the more technical ones - also "plain" grub4dos/grub4UEFI. The (very high) price is due - I believe - to the very small amount that they are made, but it doesn't seem (to me) like "rocket science", the basic idea is the same as those floppy disk replacements wherre you can select the floppy image to run/boot. Some years ago there was a USB stick that had the same capabilities (also expensive as it was almost hand made) called isostick and before that a SD card reader with the same capabilities, simply for some reasons the idea didn't become popular/ubiquitous. [1] and BTW it has some limits and compatibility issues

captainmuon 5y ago

I could imagine this being useful for our company. We need to provision the computers we make. Currently somebody runs to them and boots them with a USB stick or via PXE, or we clone the disks. But it gets cumbersome to manage all the sticks, and cloning is difficult if the device is provisioned in a different factory than where it is assembled. PXE is good for managing the images, but we need to connect a keyboard to start the installation (even though most PCs have touchscreens, but PXELinux doesn't support touch AFAIK). (I had the idea to install a panel where you could preselect which image gets sent to which "PXE cable", but we rejected that as too cumbersome.) It would be great to have a thingedy that you plug in and that can serve one of multiple ISOs to a device. (Even better if it could emulate a keyboard and automatically go into the BIOS to make the right settings, but I guess such a device would be a security hazard...)