Re: unetbootin

[Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli]

On Wed, 28 Dec 2022 12:17:46 -0500
bill-auger <bill-auger@peers.community> wrote:

> On Wed, 28 Dec 2022 02:45:11 +0100 Denis wrote:
> > I'm curious about this project as it seem to have interesting
> > features like, from a Microsoft Windows installation, reboot to a
> > GNU/Linux installer directly, without even needing an USB key.  
> 
> as i remember, this project was not an innovation - i believe
> that it was written as a libre replacement for ubuntu's 'wubi',
> which was a popular way to try/install ubuntu at the time -
> ubuntu discontinued 'wubi' after a few years though - im not
> sure why - maybe it was too difficult to maintain, or maybe
> people simply were not using it
For wubi, it had limitations like not be able to properly do suspend to
disk if I recall, but the two tools have different use cases, so what
is a limitation in wubi isn't necessarily a problem in unetbootin.

> unetbootin is (and 'wubi' was) useful for non-technical windows
> users; but once someone install a distro (replacing the windows
> bootloader with GRUB), unetbootin offers only a minor GUI
> convenience, because GRUB can boot all of those ISO files
> directly (though user must fetch each manually) .
That's only part of it. I've looked at Ventoy recently and basically
their bootloader (probably a forked GRUB 2) adds data in RAM that is
then picked by their custom kernel module that makes the iso file a
block device. Once this is done they probably added some scripts inside
distributions initramfs to choose that block device to boot on and
regenerated that initramfs.

Unetbootin probably works by extracting files from the iso and
modifying the syslinux arguments (in grub) to indicate where the have
been extracted. So it probably only supports installers with loop files
inside the iso file.

> in other words, the unique value of unetbootin is only useful is
> the user prefers to keep the windows bootloader; but experiment
> with ISOs, without burning the image to any external storage -
> drop either of thise two requirements, and this program is much
> less interesting
I was more thinking of users that use that tool only once to install
GNU/Linux and then hopefully never run Windows again. Having to have a
spare USB key is not ideal for less technical users I guess, though
this feature only worked only older Windows versions (and probably
GNU/Linux too, but then users already have GNU/Linux).

And the fact the download, verification and writing of the image is all
integrated in the same tool also makes it easy. The issue is that
in unetbootin the list of distros and release looks unmaintained.

There might be more maintainable software that have that features
nowadays but I've no idea of their names. If that software exist, maybe
they use osinfo-db to reduce maintenance.

The question would also be how to deal with FSDG compliance with tools
like that anyway. Ideally the distribution should also provide these
tools (Tails does that for instance if I recall well), but then it also
require to maintain the ability to build them and that might be a lot
of work. Though Guix is already used to build bitcoin for Windows so it
might be possible.

Denis.

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