Plop. That's the sound of a boot manager booting PCs off media they can't start from Elmar Hanlhofer's Plop Boot Managers are a small family of tiny tools to enable booting from media that a computer can't usually boot from. Before you point out that all modern computers can boot from USB – the boot managers also work well in virtual machines, where USB boot support is still a lot rarer. Yes, of course, you …
The versions of VMWare I have won't boot from USB. That is, it won't boot from any 'removable' drive. And generally, drives do correctly report if they are 'removable' or not.
You might think that it would be good to have your hypervisor boot from a removable drive, so that you could move it if the power supply or motherboard failed, but VM has sometimes disagreed with you: they have a commercial product for handling that situation,
My experience of qemu is with vert manager and kvm......in linux os ....
And yes you can boot straight fron a usb ....
You define a machine that has usb (shared from host)... there are a few distros included ..and you can also save vm's after they have been installed and removed if you have them saved.
The setup has a slightly wierd flow by which you are promted to point to install medium which it returns "cant find medium" you then select generic and then select the guest resources, if usb is checked you can then boot from there in the next step ...
My gues is plop is used for instaling quake on electronic pregnency devices and "smart" fridges, and the like..
I can see this being useful for retro machines where the BIOS doesn't support USB booting, boot Plop from a floppy or CD and then you can reinstall the OS or boot up from a USB device such as memory stick or external HDD which will be faster and more reliable than CDs or old IDE hard drives.
I used a similar tool to make a bootable USB stick which has different Window ISOs on it as well as a few Linux ones, and it comes up with a boot menu allowing you to select which ISO you want to boot from, Its called www.winsetupfromusb.com
Heard about PLOP years ago, and kept it around to try out on a lot of assorted hardware over a long time. I never found one case where PLOP helped me. It usually just froze the system on boot-up instead of actually booting from the selected media.
In the old days, projects like PLOP were useful. I think it was VMWare v1.x that wouldn't boot from some bootable OS installation CDs, while one floppy disk image "boot manager" with its own El Torito stack was able to help boot them. But that's ancient history.
A terrible Dell dual pentium4 workstation I acquired some time ago for nothing could not boot from USB from BIOS. Despite significant numbers of much cheaper systems of its era being able to do so. Plop made that system a lot easier to use.
The main novelty of that system was it had a nice SCSI controller on it and some legacy pci 64 bit slots which opened up options for dealing with various legacy media.
How well does Plop coexist with UEFI? I’ve not tried it on anything recent to notice. The Amiga cracktro style boot screen is a silly nice to have!
Interesting. Long retired,with ancient hardware,I used GAG boot manager for a couple of decades to give nice big buttons to choose system to boot. Got in a tangle on the laptop recently with an extra installation,so slung it out and used Grub, with a stick-on label with menu written in biro.
this could be a handy way round time limits on the library PCs.
That would be brave, given that to get access to library computers you have to be a member, meaning they have your photograph and address on record. If I can point out this particular line from the Computer Misuse Act:
Unlawful access is committed if the individual intentionally gains access; knowing he is not entitled to do so; and aware he does not have consent to gain access.
Personally I think it's perfectly reasonable, but the tech-illiterate plod who turns up when the librarian says that someone's been fiddling with the computers that other people potentially use for financial transactions etc may not see it that way.
Yes, there was a time when a computer might have USB ports but the firmware would not provide an option to boot from them. For that situation I found plop was a perfect solution. In effect, it provides and uses its own USB driver - that a BIOS might lack. While I'd usually install on the internal hard drive of such machines I also keep a copy of the ISO as a CD in my visit-and-boot toolkit.
For the UEFI era machines I consider rEFInd to be the equivalent.
I hadn't thought about the VM situation being similar. That might solve some conundrums that I've seen, but I'll have to ponder that - and perhaps look into whether it can cope with UEFI..
I use Sophos UTM as my home firewall (used to be Astaro Linux then it got borged by Sophos - fortunately they didn't hack it around much and honoured existing home, free licenses..).
The issue is that they don't support UEFI booting. My old firewall is an elderly HP Microserver - Intel Celeron processor... Which was OK in the old DSL/VDSL days - or even the FTTC dats since it was capable enough to keep up with the bandwidth available. Then I got FTTP (900Mb) and it's struggling..
So I bought myself a refurbished Dell Poweredge T40 - nice little server with many multiples of CPU uplift over the old HP.
I soon discovered it wasn't going to work - Sophos UTM will not boot from UEFI and the T40 *only* allows booting from UEFI (or so it seems - I couldn't find a BIOS boot made in the usual places in the BIOS).
But I could stick in a small USB stick, tell the Dell to boot from that and have it chain-boot from /dev/hda thus booting into Sophos UTM.
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