5 ms·

Well, if MS-DOS is something you'd be comfortable debugging issues within, then I imagine you'd be even happier using live images to debug issues. For smaller

Well, if MS-DOS is something you'd be comfortable debugging issues within, then I imagine you'd be even happier using live images to debug issues. For smaller ISOs, you can even just stuff it on your boot partition and have e.g. the arch install ISO as a permanent boot option should you ever need to debug. I have the Arch ISO there, in the off-chance that I massively screw up and have no spare computer to prepare an image/aid in debugging. > And then: GRUB. I still hate GRUB. I'm not a huge systemd fan, but systemd-boot just works. Configuration is trivial and does not require rebuilding, so you can change settings from anything that can mount your EFI system partition. It does have one annoying quirk, and that is that if your forget to fill in your loader.conf (needs a default entry and timeout which is commented out by default in e.g. Arch), then it silently fails. > I've been told that UEFI provides something similar to what MS-DOS and loadlin provided, To some extend - if you drop to the EFI shell (assuming your firmware includes one, otherwise you can bring your own), you can navigate supported filesystems and load ramdisks and kernels and such. It can host fancier apps too, but I haven't done more than just read files and load OS's. Useful when you effed your system and your bootloader.

franga2000 3y ago
I second the "have a recovery distro installed permanently on your computer" thing, it has saved me countless times. My choice is Puppy Linux, since it's impressively tiny and has a good selection of recovery tools preinstalled, but is also totally usable as a desktop OS in case I really need to get some things done before I have time to recover my system.
- mixmastamyk 3y ago
  Since the advent of bootable ISOs on disc and then large USB flash drives, I haven't bothered with any kind of recovery options on my computer, and now actively remove them. See recovery partitions, recovery kernel (on fedora) etc, etc. Feels redundant, and I enjoy having the disk space back. An external flash boot drive has saved me countless times, and is useful for other stuff. On it I now use Ventoy, which I heartily recommend. So much better than imaging the whole drive.
  - arghwhat 3y ago
    Ventoy is great[0], but with laptops easily having 2TB for cheap nowadays, leaving room for a sub-1GB ISO on the boot partition is not really space that would be missed. I also feel that any time one really needed an ISO, no flash drive near me ever had the right one. [0]: ... when installed, but the installation process is awful. For GPT, it's just a FAT partition with the ESP flag and a few Ventoy files on it, and yet you need to run "installers" as root to "prepare" the drive. It should just have been a tarball and a few trivial commands - not a thousand lines of bash shelling out to a custom C partitioning tool...
    - mixmastamyk 3y ago
      I have lot of multi GB movies/series in process at any time so always short on space and don’t want to lock it up in another partition. You just put several isos on it once a year. It’s usually not installed, just run. Any live distro can download additional tools as needed. And really any from the last five years are fine, partition tools and text editors haven’t innovated recently. Maybe you’d want the latest btrfs tools possibly, if so download. A cheap 64GB! flash drive dedicated to the purpose and put on a keychain works well. Think I looked for 32GB but needed to go 64 to get usb3.2+ transfer speed, which I also recommended. Still so cheap! Great for test driving new distros too. I agree about ventoy, but only had to install it once, and already blocked it out, haha. Hopefully someone strips it down and adds a lite version to debian.
ssl-3 3y ago
I used MS-DOS as flexible and (at the time) familiar environment from which to run a bootloader, which in turn loaded up a Linux kernel. Live images aren't the same thing, I don't think: Sure, I can do all kinds of useful stuff with them, and they're vaguely as familiar as any other Linuxey-thing is. But AFAIK there is no Linux equivalent to loadlin, so I can't use a live image as a flexible environment from which to run a bootloader like I did with MS-DOS over a quarter of a century ago.
- cesarb 3y ago
  > But AFAIK there is no Linux equivalent to loadlin, so I can't use a live image as a flexible environment from which to run a bootloader like I did with MS-DOS over a quarter of a century ago. There's kexec (https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man8/kexec.8.html https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man8/kexec.8.html), which allows loading a Linux kernel from within a running Linux kernel.
  - ssl-3 3y ago
    Well shit. I guess I have some work to do instead of just bellyache about the good old days, then. Thanks! (I think.)

franga2000 3y ago

I second the "have a recovery distro installed permanently on your computer" thing, it has saved me countless times. My choice is Puppy Linux, since it's impressively tiny and has a good selection of recovery tools preinstalled, but is also totally usable as a desktop OS in case I really need to get some things done before I have time to recover my system.

mixmastamyk 3y ago
Since the advent of bootable ISOs on disc and then large USB flash drives, I haven't bothered with any kind of recovery options on my computer, and now actively remove them. See recovery partitions, recovery kernel (on fedora) etc, etc. Feels redundant, and I enjoy having the disk space back. An external flash boot drive has saved me countless times, and is useful for other stuff. On it I now use Ventoy, which I heartily recommend. So much better than imaging the whole drive.
- arghwhat 3y ago
  Ventoy is great[0], but with laptops easily having 2TB for cheap nowadays, leaving room for a sub-1GB ISO on the boot partition is not really space that would be missed. I also feel that any time one really needed an ISO, no flash drive near me ever had the right one. [0]: ... when installed, but the installation process is awful. For GPT, it's just a FAT partition with the ESP flag and a few Ventoy files on it, and yet you need to run "installers" as root to "prepare" the drive. It should just have been a tarball and a few trivial commands - not a thousand lines of bash shelling out to a custom C partitioning tool...
  - mixmastamyk 3y ago
    I have lot of multi GB movies/series in process at any time so always short on space and don’t want to lock it up in another partition. You just put several isos on it once a year. It’s usually not installed, just run. Any live distro can download additional tools as needed. And really any from the last five years are fine, partition tools and text editors haven’t innovated recently. Maybe you’d want the latest btrfs tools possibly, if so download. A cheap 64GB! flash drive dedicated to the purpose and put on a keychain works well. Think I looked for 32GB but needed to go 64 to get usb3.2+ transfer speed, which I also recommended. Still so cheap! Great for test driving new distros too. I agree about ventoy, but only had to install it once, and already blocked it out, haha. Hopefully someone strips it down and adds a lite version to debian.

ssl-3 3y ago

I used MS-DOS as flexible and (at the time) familiar environment from which to run a bootloader, which in turn loaded up a Linux kernel. Live images aren't the same thing, I don't think: Sure, I can do all kinds of useful stuff with them, and they're vaguely as familiar as any other Linuxey-thing is. But AFAIK there is no Linux equivalent to loadlin, so I can't use a live image as a flexible environment from which to run a bootloader like I did with MS-DOS over a quarter of a century ago.

cesarb 3y ago
> But AFAIK there is no Linux equivalent to loadlin, so I can't use a live image as a flexible environment from which to run a bootloader like I did with MS-DOS over a quarter of a century ago. There's kexec (https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man8/kexec.8.html https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man8/kexec.8.html), which allows loading a Linux kernel from within a running Linux kernel.
- ssl-3 3y ago
  Well shit. I guess I have some work to do instead of just bellyache about the good old days, then. Thanks! (I think.)