Why ISO was retired (2021) • Hacker News Board

Re: Why ISO was retired (2021)

#21

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 8:26 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Why ISO was retired (2021)

#22

Post by loeg » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 8:30 PM UTC

programmer_dude wrote: post #13

What is a drive image? Is it a standard like ISO?

(Sibling comment already explained the concept of an image.) Yes, the boot process from this kind of image is just as standardized as an ISO.

Re: Why ISO was retired (2021)

#23

Post by Aloha » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 8:48 PM UTC

I often feel we missed a chance to make booting from removable media real easy.

If we had built ISO support into EFI, you could just copy an ISO (like a container) to a MBR or GPT partitioned thumb drive and boot it - no magic tools required, no bits to set. Yes FAT32 has a 4gb limitation, but there is nothing saying that couldn't be fixed with future versions of EFI, or by using multiple partitions on thumb drive.

Either way, I feel like an opportunity was missed.

Re: Why ISO was retired (2021)

#24

Post by rezonant » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 8:49 PM UTC

tjoff wrote: post #2

I have no idea how I would install EasyOS in my hypervisor. Well, I could probably boot from a Live linux ISO and then install it from there. And on actual hardware I can mount an ISO over IPMI but I would not immediately be able to install EasyOS that way. Also, the argument that you can store state isn't always an advantage. When I boot a Live ISO I never ever want to save anything, a clean state is one of the feat…

> Well, they don't. Maybe that ought to be a hint?

The author was saying that these tools already do support booting image files, not that they could be modified by the tool authors to add support.

Re: Why ISO was retired (2021)

#25

Post by donatj » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 8:58 PM UTC

I've always wondered, why are CDs a specific ISO file system and not just whatever the intended target can read (FAT32 / HFS(+)) like other media?

Is it just that the write once nature of the media makes pre-composing the file system a pain?

Re: Why ISO was retired (2021)

#26

Post by astrodust » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 9:04 PM UTC

donatj wrote: post #25

I've always wondered, why are CDs a specific ISO file system and not just whatever the intended target can read (FAT32 / HFS(+)) like other media? Is it just that the write once nature of the media makes pre-composing the file system a pain?

You're lucky it's standardized at all. Before the ISO specification each and every CD-ROM released had its own format, drivers, and headaches.

Re: Why ISO was retired (2021)

#27

Post by kn100 » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 9:09 PM UTC

Aloha wrote: post #23

I often feel we missed a chance to make booting from removable media real easy. If we had built ISO support into EFI, you could just copy an ISO (like a container) to a MBR or GPT partitioned thumb drive and boot it - no magic tools required, no bits to set. Yes FAT32 has a 4gb limitation, but there is nothing saying that couldn't be fixed with future versions of EFI, or by using multiple partitions on thumb drive. E…

Ventoy is a magic tool that does exactly this, if you weren't aware.

Re: Why ISO was retired (2021)

#28

Post by bombolo » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 9:16 PM UTC

tadfisher wrote: post #14

koito17 wrote: post #9

For the specific case of "burning" some Linux distro's installer to a USB drive, I've always found those .img files much easier to deal with than ISO files, simply because a single dd(1) invocation is all I need to "burn" the image onto my drive. I figure this is probably the vast majority of people who install Linux from a physical device rather than network booting. (I have dealt with PXE about a decade ago but I c…

That's the point of the "hybrid-iso" format; you can dd(1) it to a USB drive and it will boot, and you can burn it to a CD/DVD and it will boot. P.S. there's no reason to use dd(1) for this; cp(1) works just as well and is usually faster, since it can autoconfigure the block size.

To make a windows bootable USB you need windows.

Doing dd (or cp) will make a device that boots the installer but ultimately will fail to install.

Re: Why ISO was retired (2021)

#29

Post by babarock » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 9:25 PM UTC

zgluck wrote: post #20

The original https://www.iso.org/ is still here, btw. "Why ISO[-9660 format] images relases were retired from EasyOS" would have have been a more suitable headline. I kind of miss the times when hackers were sticklers for details.

Different ISO ;)

Re: Why ISO was retired (2021)

#30

Post by dicytea » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 9:32 PM UTC

tjoff wrote: post #2

I have no idea how I would install EasyOS in my hypervisor. Well, I could probably boot from a Live linux ISO and then install it from there. And on actual hardware I can mount an ISO over IPMI but I would not immediately be able to install EasyOS that way. Also, the argument that you can store state isn't always an advantage. When I boot a Live ISO I never ever want to save anything, a clean state is one of the feat…

While this article claims that it works with Ventoy, recent posts (by the same author himself) suggests that things aren't so clear and sunny: https://bkhome.org/news/202303/easyos-455-does-not-work-with...

A good final half of the article is spent on blaming Ventoy's developers and users for holding it "wrong". And here I am left still wondering what is so bad about ISOs.