On Sun, 16 Jan 2022 at 21:35, Jim Hall <jh...@freedos.org> wrote: > I write the ISO image to a USB fob drive
I don't think I've ever heard them called that before! :-) > I think you can do the same with Rufus. It writes the image and makes the > USB fob drive bootable. I would think so. I have not tried. Rufus is good (it's small, it's free, and you don't need to install it) but it's *very* slow. I only used it when I needed to make Windows bootable keys. (Not a lot of people seem to realise this, but you can freely download Windows 7/8/10/11 ISO files from microsoft.com. I think that for 7 & 8 the site wants a licence key, but it doesn't ask for 10 or 11 These days I just use Ventoy, which lets you copy as many ISO files as will fit onto a single FAT32 USB key and generates a boot menu on the fly when you boot a computer from that key. It's very convenient and it's far faster and easier than writing images. On Windows & macOS I occasionally use Balena Etcher, which is FOSS & much faster than Rufus – but sometimes Windows keys written this way aren't bootable. The snag with Etcher is that it's an Electron app, so it's relatively speaking *huge* and slow to download if you're on a slow connection. (Electron apps are written in Javascript and so the app must include an embedded web browser and Javascript interpreter. So while the app might be a couple of hundred lines of code, the Javascript frameworks it needs are hundreds of thousands of lines, and the Javascript runtime is tens of meg, and that needs hundreds of meg of web browser to support the runtime. This is considered normal in FOSS these days.) Result: the tool to write a minimal or small FreeDOS ISO to USB is bigger than the ISO itself. Insane but true. > So my question is really: what about using Rufus to write the FreeDOS 1.3 CD > ISO image to a USB fob drive - instead of providing a 32MB "Lite" USB image > and a 512MB "Full" USB image. There are dozens of FOSS ISO-writers and most will probably be faster than Rufus. In the old days, with optical media, I used ImgBurn or CDBurnerXP. Some are tiny, as in under 1MB. > That would seem to be the easiest option, in my mind. It seems like it would > be simpler to provide the LiveCD ISO image and people can write that to a USB > fob drive with a tool like Rufus. Agreed. Just saying that both "small" and "fast" are good priorities, and Ventoy may be easier for many people. -- Liam Proven ~ Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk ~ gMail/gTalk/FB: lpro...@gmail.com Twitter/LinkedIn: lproven ~ Skype: liamproven UK: (+44) 7939-087884 ~ Czech [+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal]: (+420) 702-829-053 _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
