I've never tried ventoy, but if the PXE/netboot features work, I want to strongly urge anyone thinking of experimenting with PXE/netboot to use ventoy or any other similar helper instead of trying to set up PXE/netboot yourself. I can confidently say that PXE was the single most difficult project/aspect of computing I've ever worked on in the 20 years of working with Linux machines as a hobby and a job. 3-4 times I attempted to mess with it, got it working about 2. Wasted/spent an absolutely enormous amount of time.
PXE is one of those things that used to be dead simple to set up. Just add an entry to the DHCP record and set up a TFTP server for the kernel and NFS root drive and you were golden.
UEFI threw a huge moneywrench in the process, and SystemD doesn't help. Last time I made it work I had to track down a mailing list entry where someone discussed an otherwise undocumented kernel option that needed to be set to make it work. One of the key glue techs that made it work last time (rom-o-matic) went out of development and is gone.
Otherwise, your going to get the wrong arch/filename.
It is similar to HTTPS, but the arch = 00:10 for x64 and it needs:
option vendor-class-identifier "HTTPClient";
Then put the URL in the filename field.
Finally just put the usual bios/pxe stub in the last "else"
Of course, your distro should provide a PXE capable grub/kernel/initrd, which you then toss on the TFTP/HTTPS (or HTTP then you don't have to deal with certs) server in the path provided.
UEFI seems hard, because there's no standardized way to boot ISO files, and memdisk from syslinux doesn't work in UEFI. With memdisk, the OS kernel could (if properly written) hook into the loaded image, and mount that as well.
Without that support, you have to take apart ISO files to netboot them, and your PXE environment needs to understand the various kernels and how to boot them, and how to provide modules / filesystem images.
Either Dell or Lenovo (can't remember which, I own both laptops) has some new-generation HTTPS boot, tried it (I wanted to dual boot FreeBSD/Linux without messing with UEFI, disabling secure boot, or repartitioning, just pressing F12 and net-booting), wasted another 2-3 hours rebooting each time, got absolutely nowhere again. Man, this stuff is cursed.
Just commenting an adjacent UEFI problem solved: My workaround at work with some old test robots that I still use, but don't have UEFI... Put iPXE on a flash drive, and use that to chain-boot into the uefi-only PXE setup. (there's still a few that this doesn't work for, but it's a minority and I'm going to scrap those...)
iPXE makes the client-side part of it manageable; the only drawback is having to walk through the open pull-requests on github for the patches you need to get it working, and possibly having to fight some buggy uefi drivers (usually solved with snponly). Also has the advantage of making it possible to do everything secureboot + over TLS with your own certificates, rather than classical PXE which is all plaintext.
For the serverside, there are several python projects on github which provide everything you need in one package, for example pybootd.
But I get a good bit of satisfaction of having gleaned a pretty functional understanding of setting up PXE/netboot (Ubuntu installs; with a Ubuntu PXE server via DNSMasq + nfs + tftp).
I even did some grub menu user input (and ascii art while I was at it) prompts/trickery to allow choosing the machine name shortly after boot, before the long slow Ubuntu install.
The list of things I've failed at (memtest) or not tried (Windows) is surely long, though.
Ventoy is fantastic for any lower-volume imaging needs I have, of course.
I tried iVnetoy on both Windows and Linux, on Windows I couldn't get it working (don't know why, maybe a firewall issue?), but on Linux it worked flawlessly, and the injection features are also great
Ventoy and iVentoy are separate products. I have not tried iVentoy -- I have no real need for it -- but I can attest to the USB-key tool's simplicity and utility. I suspect the netboot one will be comparably good.
> Deepin is a distribution developed in Wuhan, China by Deepin Technology. Its homepage proclaims it "the top Linux distribution from China" ... The extensive EULA is uncommon for the Linux space, and the privacy policy goes into some detail about the types of information they collect – not just browser history, but information on when you use your computer and the applications installed on your system.
> Deepin Technology said today it is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of Union Tech ... developed a new UOS product ... The UOS preparatory group was voluntarily initiated by a number of domestic operating system core companies. Its members include China Electronics Group (CEC), Wuhan Shenzhidu Technology Co., Ltd., Nanjing Chengmai Technology, and ZTE New Fulcrum ... It has set up a headquarters in Beijing and established branches in Shanghai, Guangzhou, Wuhan, Nanjing, Xi'an, Chengdu and other places.
> It supports hundreds of distros and dozens of OSes.
Indeed, so why is Deepin the only distro worthy of a "Friendly Link" on the Ventoy home page? Are they a sponsor of the project? Code contributor? Preferred demo platform?
It is one of the major distros, with millions of users, and yet there is very little knowledge of it in the West. Its commercial upstream claims to have over 3 million paid users:
I suspect that in plain old user numbers it is up there with Debian, Ubuntu and CentOS, and yet you rarely even hear it mentioned in the same breath. Nor is its desktop, DDE, which is FOSS and is supported in Fedora, openSUSE and has its own Ubuntu remix.
I wrote about it here: https://www.theregister.com/2021/12/10/friday_foss_fest/
Now there's a PXE network-boot version too.
https://www.iventoy.com/en/index.html