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Makes me wonder how far the closest alternative, glim, could be upgraded to match Ventoy given the confines of GRUB.
Someone had mentioned that Fedora fails to verify when booting from Ventoy. Now I'm thinking if I could dd the media loaded via Ventoy and compare with an original copy to see what changed.
I just wish it had a real alternative. GRUB on USB doesnt support as much distros or windows.
Is BLOB an acronym?
Nope, but it has become a backronym https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_storage#Origins
Cool thanks :)
I was bored at work one day. I decided to put a nyan cat easter egg in my company's app. If at the loading progress bar screen you typed NYAN it would turn the progress bar into a rainbow being created by a little nyan cat while playing the nyan cat song. The mp3 (inconspicuously renamed without the extension) doubled our build size. No one batted an eye cause no one paid attention to the build size much.
Fast forward 5 years later, at a different job, I get a phone call from the old boss. Do you happen to know anything about this nyan cat file we found?
I had no idea what he was talking about.
That story was a journey.
After I saw that issue, I attempted to build Ventoy from source. After making numerous modifications and getting only the first couple components built, I got tired of it and quit. I've made some modifications to glim and use that instead, although it's still not as easy as Ventoy. But I don't trust Ventoy if I can't build it myself.
Further, when @[email protected] made some criticisms of Ventoy in one of her YouTube videos, she was subjected to a harassment campaign, and others told her the same happened to them. That pushed me from not trusting Ventoy to actively distrusting it.
Further, when @[email protected] made some criticisms of Ventoy in one of her YouTube videos, she was subjected to a harassment campaign, and others told her the same happened to them.
What the fuck is happening to the world? Are we regressing or were we always this regressed and we've just given powerful tools to fucking chowderheads?
There's a subset of the Linux/FOSS/etc. community who are Conservative, misogynistic, racist, and/or otherwise general bigots. Compare the Ventoy-bros against the Elon-bros, and you'll see a similar pattern of behavior.
I don't personally understand it, since development is still sometimes seen as "work for weirdo nerds," so you'd think they would understand what it feels like to be rejected or bullied, but here we are. They manage to stay under the radar, because there's usually no reason to discuss politics or philosophy when you're debugging code.
There’s a subset of the Linux/FOSS/etc. community who are Conservative, misogynistic, racist, and/or otherwise general bigots.
right, the hackernews set...
It's a useful tool, but there is a security concern for anything not fully open source. You will have to weigh your risk factors, I doubt that it's any problem for most consumers or distro hoppers.
Best to keep an eye in case any new contributers arrive suddenly...
bruh.
I too wish the developer would respond, but I don't think this is the catastrophe people are making it out to be. One comment seems to explain why these binaries are included:
Because ventoy supports shim, and by extension secure boot, these files needs to come from a signed Linux distro. In this case they are taken from Fedora releases, and OpenSUSE apparently, as they publish shim binaries and grub binaries signed by their certificate.
While this is true, it only requires the shim and grub to be copied for another distro.
From other comments there are a lot more blobs than just these two.
If the hashes match the files from the Fedora or OpenSUSE releases, then does this really matter?
It sounds to me as a documentation issue, as the next comment says, simply including a wget script should solve this.
On the contrary: that just goes to show what a fucking catastrophe for software freedom "Secure[sic] Boot" is.
Hey guys open source is great you can look at all the code and therefore there are no security backdoors etc. Also here are a bunch of pre-compiled blobs in the repo, don't worry about those, but they are required to run the program.
The fact that people know there are pre-compiled blobs in open source means they have an informed reason to avoid the software!
God I hate people who use github comments for their own benefit. "Just fork it bro" is never helpful.
Seriously this. Any comment about a complicated system that starts with "just" can be ignored 99% of the time.
Also, there are 4k forks of Ventoy already. Obviously forking it isn't helping. Actual work needs to be done.
For me the problem is more in GPL violation: they distribute blobs under GPL3, user made a request of the source code by creating an issue, but they ignored that request. It is not only about "you have to fix it" versus "just fork it" imo.
Any alternatives to this tool? I've used it a lot lately because I was testing out live OSes before installing one to the hard drive, but otherwise I don't need it on a daily basis.
I guess, you could buy a handful of USB sticks...
but otherwise I don’t need it on a daily basis.
I'll be real, this is part of why I didn't understand Ventoy. I keep a bunch of large, fast thumbdrives around blank and available. When I need/want to put an OS on there, I do it when I need it, and then I'm always installing the most current version of the install. It takes under 5 minutes, at best.
I used to try to keep various installs on thumbdrives... but it would be two years down the line by the time I needed to use it again and by that time it's literally pointless to be using two year old installation media.
Part of the point behind Ventoy is that you don't need to prepare the USB to be bootable. You can just copy/paste the whole iso into Ventoy and it will be bootable. New release comes out? Just copy it onto your USB drive. Don't even need to remove the old version of you don't want to.
Makes things much easier in the tech world for having a single USB with 50+ bootable tools and installers on there like with MediCat (which uses Ventoy as a base).
Only thing I've had issues with booting from Ventoy is the ProxMox install iso. Everything else has worked first try.
When I was working in IT, this would have been a very useful tool for doing some on-site troubleshooting with various tools or for one-off reimaging machines that were missed during a big update or something. Instead, I had a bag of USB sticks with labels on them, which was annoying to use and to maintain.
Ventoy wasn't a foolproof solution but it really did beat the hell out of using 6 different USB drives. Most USB "pen drives" don't make labeling easy and without labeling I'm just plugging them in one by one till I find the one I want.
I remember various different concepts of USB flash drives with integrated LCDs that would display a label and the remaining capacity. Then they vanished and the only thing left were the Lexar Echo drives. Until a few years ago, when they have been pulled from the markets. Probably, because they didn't work with the now default GPT and its many different partition types.
IODD makes some. I had the older HDD version that stopped working after it got dropped, so now I use this one:
https://www.iodd.shop/IODD-SSD-drive-with-mini-USB-30-with-secure-256-bit-encryption
All my laziness about not checking it out has come to fruition. Now I simply don't have to, because this is sketch as fuck until it is handled.
I never trusted it because I thought it was completely proprietary. Well now I know it basically is.