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Old 29th January 2014
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IdOp IdOp is offline
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Join Date: May 2008
Location: twisting on the daemon's fork(2)
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Originally Posted by censored View Post
I have old machines that could be put online for various purposes, but they don't have bios USB-boot support. I happened across the "plop" boot kickstart program. Does anyone have any caveats or praises for it? Since it plays at the bottom of the stack, I haven't just "dropped it in".....
I experimented a little with plop within the past year. Here are a few things dredged up from memory:

1) Like you, I wanted it for USB booting on older machines that don't support it in the BIOS. I got it to work, so that in itself is a good thing. One small-to-medium-sized caveat though is that it will not work through a secondary USB hub, you have to plug the USB device to be booted right into a port off a root hub.

2) The documentation could be better.

3) The project has the flavour more typical of the DOS free-/share-ware culture, rather than BSD (or even Linux). For example, the author has presumably gone to great lengths to make the boot screen graphical and give it a moving "starfield" background that looks like you're zipping through space. This is impressive in a way that he has the programming ability to do it, but the decision to do it just makes me shake my head. Well it's his project and he can do what he thinks is fun. It just seems kind of unfortunate that he didn't apply his ability to make it better other ways. But I suppose if he couldn't have fun with it, he might have done nothing. Sorry I'm rambling along here.

In the end I installed it as a boot option on one or two machines, in case I ever need it, but haven't used it since.
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