On 2023-09-04, Kenny McCormack wrote:
> In article <
slrnufcb9...@djph.net>, Dan Purgert <
d...@djph.net> wrote:
>>On 2023-09-04, Mike Easter wrote:
>>> I'm trying to make an .iso out of an .img. The Armbian project is about
>>> providing .img/s to write to SDs to boot on lots of different ARM
>>> boards, *BUT* they also provide an image for 'generic' Intel/AMD. But I
>>> don't want a big fat .img to boot; I would rather have an .iso,
>>> preferably one that I can boot on a Ventoy USB stick.
> ...
>>Raspbian/Armbian/etc-ian being "fully installed(tm)" systems, since
>>their usual target device (a Raspberry Pi) cannot boot off anything
>>except the SD Card (so no point in making a "bootable image" that you
>>then use as "an installer" when the target can't work from it)
>
> This isn't strictly true. The Pi establishment *could* have set it up
> where they give you a bootable SD card and a CD. The workflow would then
> be that you plug in your CD drive, put the CD in the drive, boot the
> SD card and go. Much like the early days of Linux, where you'd open
> the box and see a CD and a boot floppy.
They certainly "could" have -- but it makes zero sense to do so.
"Hey you have this credit-card sized SBC, but you need a bootable SD
card [linkhere] a non-bootable CD installer [linkhere], AND a spare USB
HDD as installation target to make it work. Oh, and you can't ever
remove the boot SD Card, or it'll stop working."
vs.
"Burn this OS image to that SD Card, and have fun"
> And, if they had, a fair number of people would have been happier. This
> was a frequent complaint in the early days of the Pi. But time has gone
> by, and we've all gotten used to the image way, so nobody grumbles
> about it anymore.
Only complaints I remember were that Windows users had a fair bit of
pain, due to severe shortcomings with native tools.
Well, that and their great capacity for trashing SD Cards :D