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multibootusb
Discontinued A collection of GRUB files and scripts that will allow you to create a pendrive capable of booting different ISO files (by aguslr)
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In case others have the same question I did:
Only supports Windows, no Linux or macOS support planned.[1]
[1]: https://github.com/pbatard/rufus/wiki/FAQ#do-you-plan-to-por...
From wikipedia[1]:
> Multiple installs on the same device are not supported.
If one is limited to a single usb-stick per ISO, it's just easier to dd the installation image: run it the way it's (hopefully) been tested by the vendors.
Ventoy is a different ballgame: drag & drop ISO file and boot from it. I tested it this morning with 3 things I carry around myself (debian-live, debian-installer, freebsd release installer), and it worked. 1 stick instead of 3, and I still have that exFAT partition for other things.
Regarding bugs -- it works or it doesn't for your distribution. I think it's remarkable what this, seemingly single developer, has achieved over a bit more than a year[2].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNetbootin
[2]: https://github.com/ventoy/Ventoy/commit/2090c6fa978999d4ef1e...
[]: don't get me started with Intel SSD firmware "bootable" images.
Rufus is great for writing Windows ISOs to thumb drives. Sometimes it tries to be too smart though. In particular I had trouble writing a SmartOS disk image successfully.
I tried writing something[1] that would be a little smarter than Win32 Disk Imager. That is, it will adjust EFI partition labeling. Otherwise it will just write the image. After some experimentation that is what was needed to get a SmartOS disk image to boot on my old laptop.
It sounds obvious in retrospect, but you can’t use something like dd to write invalid disk partitioning data and expect it to boot. EFI expects there to be a header at the beginning and end of the disk. Furthermore, I can’t try to “optimize” my disk image writer by skipping zeroed sectors and expect everything to work out fine. Without knowledge of the file system format, leaving sectors uncleared causes all kinds of fun data corruption.
[1]: https://github.com/AustinWise/SimpleDiskImager
UNetbootin has done this since 2007:
<https://unetbootin.github.io/>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNetbootin>
This is barely a year old and comes all, besides a handful of comments, from one account https://github.com/ventoy/Ventoy/graphs/contributors
Personally and subjective this rings quite some alarm bells for me, seems just a bit sketchy and in any way really young, so not as much time out on the field and thus possibly not as much bugs shaken out...
For anyone complaining that there is no nice GUI for dd on Linux and macOS, I recently discovered Fedora Media Writer [1] which works great for this job. Despite it’s name, it can be used with any ISO just like dd.
[1] https://github.com/FedoraQt/MediaWriter