Plop Boot Manager(www.plop.at)
33 pointsby LorenDB9 months ago5 comments
  • johnwbyrd9 months ago
    Thank you Plop, but nowadays we have a profusion of blessings, including VenToy, iVenToy, and netboot.xyz.
    • lproven9 months ago
      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.

    • Gormo9 months ago
      Aren't all of those just prebuilt images that use Syslinux?

      Plop is itself an actual boot manager.

  • Oxodao9 months ago
    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
    • dmitrygr9 months ago
      > I'm not sure it's still that useful

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

    • reginald789 months ago
      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.
  • ashleyn9 months ago
    Used this to boot from usb on systems that didn't support usb boot back in the day. Good stuff.
  • pathartl9 months ago
    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.
  • rkagerer9 months ago
    Love the no-no sense, approachable documentation at that page.