Live media

[verndog]

I too don't want to re-invent the wheel, so to that end I found Ventory. I just add any distro.iso to Ventoy's bootable usb drive and away I go.
https://www.ventoy.net/en/index.html

[Don B. Cilly]

Oh, I do
I think wheels leave a lot to be desired. Apparently Goodyear and Michelin think so too...

Just kidding, obviously. Still, for some unfathomable reason, removable drives get on my nerves.
Especially if they have to be used mandatorily, with no alternative except obscure and failure-prone uses of grub - which gets on my nerves even more than USB drives.
I positively hate grub, and I don't use it - except when strictly necessary.

And I really don't see anything wrong with having a compressed file - same size as the ISO, pretty much - you can just unzip to an empty partition and just boot.
And can be "personalised".
The subsequent "install", mind you, (which just configures your hardware, user and time zone) takes about a minute.

About "personalisation"... I'll make another post about that, shall I?
It's the next step of my experimenting, I like the idea.

[Don B. Cilly]

Personalisation.
I tried making a nice personalised neon. Which I could, say, send to my son in Panama to put on his super-laptop.
Nice theme, cool conky, lovely clock, space-view wallpaper, just a few bells'n'whistels to try it out.

Except, as soon as I do the "setup" on it, the OEM thing does not copy the /home settings to the new user.
It just deletes them so all my pretty stuff goes POOF.
Apps I installed are there, but not configured, and no autostart.

I'll try putting the necessary stuff in /etc/skel. It should work.
I wonder why the OEM thing doesn't do that though... personalisation is supposed to be one of the strong points of it...

[jglen490]

Of course, removable boot media with Live/Install stuff is not the only way. There are many proponents of alternatives here on KFN.

As for me, the Live/Install approach is very effective, and it provides a recovery point if a reinstall is needed. Mine is not the only approach, but it works for what I do.

So rock on, Don, you're doing good stuff.

[Don B. Cilly]

Well,
As Douglas D. Zaster (Major, S.A.S, retd.) would say... this is quite a major disaster :·/

What I could not achieve was: copy the install partition to a different machine and boot it successfully.
Boot fails with multiple hardware issues.

Since the (let's call it) mini-installer at first boot does say "configuring hardware", I was hoping the first boot itself would be somewhat "hardware-agnostic". It isn't.

I made a feature request on Calamares's github.
Maybe they can do it. I can't.