Plop Boot Manager

plop.at

33 points·LorenDB··10 comments

Thank you Plop, but nowadays we have a profusion of blessings, including VenToy, iVenToy, and netboot.xyz.

Well, yes, but while Ventoy is great and I am a big fan, it has a totally different use case.

In principle they could work great together, which demonstrates the almost total lack of overlap.

Ventoy is for making multiboot USB keys.

Plop is for making PCs boot from USB even if their firmware can't.

So, you could use Plop on a floppy or CDR to make a PC start Ventoy, and then use Ventoy to choose which old-style x86/32-BIOS distro to install.

Aren't all of those just prebuilt images that use Syslinux?

Plop is itself an actual boot manager.

Plop is an excellent software but I'm not sure it's still that useful. I remember using it to boot to usb sticks on bios that did not support it years ago. That was really cool

I used it to allow booting from USB on ESXi VMs, which (at the time anyway) didn't support this. I remember how ridiculous it was passing through an unraid USB, booting from a plop iso which then handed off the boot to the USB. It was slow but did work.

> I'm not sure it's still that useful

Until you need to boot an old x86 system for some reason

Used this to boot from usb on systems that didn't support usb boot back in the day. Good stuff.

Fond memories. I was a teen and gifted a laptop that had USB ports, a floppy drive, and no working CD drive. I used Plop on a floppy to boot off USB and install Windows XP.

Love the no-no sense, approachable documentation at that page.

*no-nonsense

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