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Comment by jauntywundrkind | Hacker News Reader

What alternatives are there?

No where near the ergonomics as far as I can tell, but with containers, there's been an effort to make bootable containers. I seem to remember there being some other options (I wanna say like Wyvern or something like that was one but not finding it), but the big obvious effort is bootc. https://containers.github.io/bootable/projects.html . 38d old thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40289120

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The physical one, which is more reliable to boot because it's emulating the actual USB-DVD/USB-HD/USB-flash interfaces when you use it.

https://www.iodd.shop/IODD-ST400-USB-30-External-Encrypted-H...

I love using my IODD in "dual-mode" with Clonezilla. It exposes a USB-DVD drive with an emulated Clonezilla DVD in it as well as its' HDD storage so I can dump an image right to the hard drive.

(Bonus points: I can then have Clonezilla bundle me a clonezilla-iso package of my captured image, and save it back into the ISO folder to boot from later!)

I almost want one of these, except I have no use for it nowadays. Ventoy didn't even work the one time I tried it, probably because it couldn't hook nixos's initrd properly.

But also, I'm insanely frustrated that (1) Google doesn't allow USB Gadget mode to do this from stock Android (2) the app that appeared to work for LineageOS/rooted devices is abandonware.

There's no good reason why your phone can't serve up ISOs with gadget mode.

I already travel with my ancient Pixel 3a as a backup (which has come in handy, clumsy me). It would be slick to have that as a portable ISO host, and backup phone. (Ignore the USB2 USB-C port, it's fine.)

I remember giving that a go many years ago. Not 100% successful, but when it worked, it was fantastic. It would be incredibly handy nowadays, especially for troubleshooting use cases. OS installation, memtest, clonezilla, portable Windows installation, and you'll always have them with you since you're already carrying your phone!

This might not help you that much depending on your use case but Ubuntu Touch can do this: https://open-store.io/app/me.fredl.isodrive

...and runs on the Pixel 3a: https://devices.ubuntu-touch.io/device/sargo/

This looks promising: https://github.com/tjmnmk/gadget_cdrom

It's using a Raspberry Pi Zero to emulate a USB CD-ROM. A menu on the device allows you to choose an ISO to boot from.

That project isn't very active. The last significant commit was 3 years ago.

Doesn't really need to be active to be useful.

It's more work, but there are sample configs for grub2 to boot multiple ISOs, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38663958

You can create your own multi-boot media fairly easily with Syslinux. My understanding of Ventoy was that it was just a set of config scripts for Syslinux in the first place.

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