Using EasyOS with Ventoy

Ventoy is a multi-boot system, you can place lots of Linux distributions on a USB-stick, and there will be a menu to choose which to boot:

https://www.ventoy.net/en/index.html

I suppose it is off interest to disro-hoppers!

If you want to put EasyOS into Ventoy, it used to work -- only just -- now doesn't.

The Ventoy website has a tick alongside EasyOS, meaning it works. However, there is this problem...

When Easy is on its own on a USB-stick, at first bootup, the ext4 working-partition is expanded to fill the drive, then it is populated. That population includes 'vmlinuz', 'initrd' and 'easy.sfs' copied from the boot-partition to the working-partition.

In Ventoy, Easy is unable to increase the size of the working-partition -- that is the crux of the problem.

Fine, except in Easy 3.4.7 the working-partition is only 640MiB, and files to be copied are too big. In much earlier versions of Easy, 'easy.sfs' was smaller and did just fit. No longer.

It gets worse. In Easy Bookworm, the working-partition is only 4MiB.

There is a fix: you have to do some surgery on the 'easy*.img' file, and increase the ext4 working-partition to a reasonable size. Forum member measter has asked about this, and I have posted how to do it:

https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.php?p=57638#p57638

Increasing the .img file to 2GiB is still rather small, but it will work. Given that Easy has to share the USB-stick with other distributions, there is a size constraint.

We could upload these bigger .img files somewhere, if there is interest.   

Tags: easy