Off-Topic > Off-Topic - Tiny Tux's Corner

a rant/discussion about grub bootloaders - MBR and EFI

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aus9:
@PDP-8

Thankyou for your work and time. I have not had a chance to test your howto in your YUMI post but plan to do so when I can.

hidden agenda, I am tempted to do something which would make it fall into the unofficial remaster sub-forum,
if my evil plans work....they rarely do ....its a karma thing  ;D

PDP-8:
No problem - if you keep your wits about you and where data directories belong, multibooters can also be used to conveniently boot multiple versions of TinyCore, release candidates, dCore etc etc.

This is a very convenient way to use and contrast differences without having to burn 5 different tinycore sticks.

My main purpose for the multibooters was that unlike simple graphical "dd"er type utilities, which fail to boot the current iso's on uefi systems, the multibooters due to their nature, substitute their own front-end bootloaders and filesystems - pulling iso's apart and putting them back together, and often rewriting grub.cfg.  Something the simple dd'ers like Etcher, or simple windows right-click "burn image to cd" simply do what they are told - but the iso image is not suitable for uefi booting as is.

Obviously multibooter support is a can of worms.  Sometimes it works perfectly, and other times, like with 64bit uefi, you *may* want to find out what tweaks to a grub.cfg they have made in error.

It reminds me of my days circa 2005 or so, when I was delighted to liberate Apple Power-PC models like iMacs to be able to boot Linux or *BSD's instead.  I was stoked!  BUT ..

There were two ways to go about it:  Become an expert in manipulating the so-called "Open Firmware" of Apple, and manually build all this stuff such as described by CRUX Linux.  Worked great!  BUT, one wrong move, and you were back to square one.  More likely you just got burned out and reloaded Apple's walled-garden o/s.

OR, some total unix-boffins at Ubuntu and FreeBSD made it so that all you had to do was give your Apple a 3-finger salute, and install from the CD, which was easily burned too.

The joy of liberating some nice hardware from that walled-garden gave me no end of joy on many levels.  Others wanted that joy - but I couldn't reach them with the CRUX method.  Only with the easier to install Ubuntu / FreeBSD on those PPC macs could we enjoy sharing and learning unix with each other.

Similar situation exists with the current TC iso on modern uefi-hardware.  Disable secure-boot natch.  Done.  But how is my neighbor going to even *start* the process with his current lineup of computers without becoming an astro-boffin about how to format, partition, and manually install a bootloader, when listing directories with "ls" is an advanced subject? :)

In the end not a big deal as there are other options.  But my heart just yearns for TC to have that kind of simplicity, just to be able to share it so easily.

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