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Comment by mhio | Hacker News Reader

I haven't touched a physical optical drive in many years, but I still use ISO's regularly for building virtual machine images or booting servers into something quickly. I can get away with plain pxe/netboot for distro's I'm familiar with the packaging of but an ISO is the distro packaging unit I know that will work wherever it is needed.

EasyOS might be targeted elsewhere? Compared to say debian/ubuntu/rhel

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That's an interesting point. It's easy to mount an ISO in VirtualBox, but I don't see a way to mount any sort of "virtual USB flash drive". I wonder what's the easiest[1] way to install an OS in a VM if you don't have an ISO.

Even more interesting is EasyOS's official install instructions[2] seem to tell you to download a live CD ISO for an old version, and move from there to the latest version. I guess they're not completely free of needing ISOs just yet.

[1] Obviously excluding things like virt-install. I'm talking about live booting an interactive OS or installer.

[2] https://easyos.org/install/easy-frugal-installation.html, search for "Easy live-CD"

> I wonder what's the easiest[1] way to install an OS in a VM if you don't have an ISO

I can't recall seeing any generic disk image alternatives to ISO's. It's generally download a virtual disk image (e.g Vagrant), and if the image is not in the right format convert it before attaching.

The only other work flow I use is to netboot with iPXE [0]. All it needs is a http(s) endpoint for the initrd/kernel and away you go, but there is a bit of investment in setting up the initial boot environment.

[0]: https://ipxe.org/

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