this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2024
69 points (93.7% liked)

Open Source

31352 readers
168 users here now

All about open source! Feel free to ask questions, and share news, and interesting stuff!

Useful Links

Rules

Related Communities

Community icon from opensource.org, but we are not affiliated with them.

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I was genuinely excited when I first learnt about the Ventoy from a YouTube, then I came to these:

Ventoy source code contains some unknown BLOBs, still no word on the issue from the dev after months https://programming.dev/post/19516543

Ventoy Update https://programming.dev/post/20508826

https://github.com/ventoy/Ventoy/issues/2795

https://www.reddit.com/r/Ventoy/comments/1flw461/today_i_discovered_ventoy/

so maybe I'll hold off with Ventoy for now?

all 18 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 43 points 1 month ago (1 children)

The "Ventoy Update" post looks rather suspicious to me. The dev didn't respond to the GitHub issue, so this might just be some jackass pretending to be the dev.

But independently of that, the BLOBs are even more suspicious...

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

Funny, I'm flashing a new PC as we speak and using dd instead of ventoy for this very reason. I've also used Balena Etcher in the past.

[–] cplusplus 14 points 1 month ago (1 children)

good 'ol dd, that's a good way to do it

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Yeah, well... turns out the USB wasn't bootable (grub said it couldn't load the kernel) so I redid it with Balena and it worked fine.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago

I noticed yesterday that openSUSE specifically recommends not using Ventoy, due to possible boot issues: https://en.opensuse.org/Create_installation_USB_stick#Ventoy

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago

Just use cp instead. No reason to use dd.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 month ago

note that the blobs aren't unknown, they're builds of submodules that the developer hopefully hasn't added malware to

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 month ago (2 children)

I wouldn’t trust it in its current state. Maybe things will get cleared up in time, maybe not.

With that said, how necessary is Ventoy, really? How much time & effort is it really saving you?

[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Not strictly necessary, but being able to carry all my ISOs on a single USB key saves me from having to redo the whole USB Stick Writer thingy every time. Is there another tool out there that does this and makes it easy for the plebs like myself?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

It's solving a real problem in a niche case. Someone called it gimmicky, but it's actually just a good tool currently produced by an unknown quantity. Hopefully it'll be sorted or someone else takes up the reigns and creates an alternative that works perfectly for all my different isos.

For the average home punter maybe even up to home lab enthusiast, probably not saving much time. For me it's on my keyring and I use it to reload proxmox hosts, Nutanix hosts, individual Ubuntu vms running ROS Noetic and not to mention reimaging for test devices. Probably a thrice weekly thing.

So yeah, cumulatively it's saving me a lot of time and just in trivialising a process.

If this was a spanner I'd just go Sidchrome or kingchrome instead of my Stanley. But it's a bit niche so I don't know what else allows for such simple multi iso boot. Always open to options.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 month ago

I mean, being able to carry a little thing with multiple OSs AND STILL being able to use it as portable storage for other stuff is really useful.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago

I stopped using Ventoy. I don't trust the OSs installed by means of it, sadly. Also, lost any hope of a clarification on the issue. Yes, you should not use it for the time being.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago

I understand how this could be a prime target of a supply chain attack and that things are a bit fishy. On the other hand people are waaaay less picky about installing other binary blobs on their machines. I wish paranoia would be more general :)

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

I will still use it for testing things, but I will no longer use it for installing the OS on a PC I'm going to use until they get the BLOB issue sorted out.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

I've never felt the need for it and didn't know what it was til just now. dd'ing image files to USB drives has worked fine for me.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

I mean it's just kinda gimmicky so with this added issue I just can't support it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

@cplusplus I forgot #Ventoy even existed!