Plop boot manager

[ocicat]

Originally Posted by censored

No - the plop boot is not FreeBSD. It's a glorified boot block shim that has USB knowledge, so can boot USB media on old machines that don't have the cojones built into BIOS.

I don't know how much discussion such a thread would generate, but I'd be curious to see any responses given.

You might consider posting to the hardware section here.

Discussion may also open up if you were to disclose why booting from USB appears to be the only option considered.

[IdOp]

Originally Posted by censored

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.

[ocicat]

Discussion specific to the Plop boot manager:

http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanagers.html

in this thread has been extracted from the following thread:

http://daemonforums.org/showthread.p...9580#post49580

Separation was done to facilitate archive searching. We find that most members here use this site for searching through all discussions. To simplify that work, we encourage members to limit discussion to a single topic in all threads.

[censored]

Originally Posted by IdOp

...
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.

Thanks for the info. The idea of using closed source stuff bugs me a little bit. It'd be nice to have the assembly code, with gazillions of comments. I'm tempted to put it up on bochs or gxemul, except that rev-eng probably goes against the license ...

The concept is not particularly challenging, yet few or no people have done it in the past (AFAIK). It's a (very) small niche idea, but could be a useful one.

When it comes to boot code, I'm obsessive-compulsive-level cautious/paranoid. I haven't downloaded it yet. I'm just looking to other users for validation...

[IdOp]

Yeah, I don't like that it's not open source either, and usually try to avoid such things, but am not always successful.