Landley said in one of his talks (I think it was the linked one) that his goal with Toybox was to enable Android devices to function as a Linux-like development environment.
Toybox provides the shell utilities. You can plug in a keyboard and mouse via the USB charging port. You can screencast to a TV via a Chromecast. Somehow you'd need to get a compilation toolchain on there.
It's an interesting idea IMO. For many people an Android device is their only computer... though I'm not aware of anyone doing this for real in the wild?
To be a little pedantic, that's not exactly what he meant. I only say this because his true vision is a lot more beautiful than that.
He wants to reduce the barrier to entry for tech and empower anyone with the drive to build not be limited by their resources. This is particularly why he focuses on Android smartphones because they're the most popular in the developing world. Also since smartphones are full fledged computers with touchscreens as their primary input method it's the perfect tool for this.
Furthermore, his baseline for this is any such device should have the tools necessary to build a working version of Linux from start to finish on itself. Which is why he's built toy box; it should, by the end of it, have all the tools necessary to building a working build of Linux with a single binary.
I installed Windows 10 the other week - it kinda blew my mind how poor the install experience was.
The iso contained files greater than 4GB, which breaks fat32, which I'm sure many people are still using on flash drives. So I had to use an MS cmd-line tool to split the wim files manually and edit the install files. Why doesn't the installer just use smaller archive files?
If you were supposed to use NTFS that's what the Media Creation tool would do. Instead it uses FAT32 and an image with superior compression (ESD). This is because FAT32 is the only required format for UEFI implementations to boot from.
Some advanced tools, and I'd recommend looking at Ventoy over Rufus, use an intermediate loader to mitigate that. Others just let you assume the board supports NTFS boot.
But then you'd use the same method as installing other OS and people would realise installing a Linux distro is easy. Of course MS already made it much harder with secureboot and "accidentally" wiping Linux installs when you install it second.
Given the massive updates you immediately have to download, and the heavy push for only installing with an online account, there seems little reason to have anything beyond a minimal net installer on the USB stick.
Microsoft taught me to be this cynical about their motives over a few decades.
Meh, I don't have any love for windows, but IME newish versions seem quite well-behaved regarding Linux. Sure, they'll rewrite the UEFI boot order, but once you set it back to what you want, it leaves it alone.
The one thing I absolutely hate, is the recovery partition at the end of the main C: drive. So that if you want to grow the C drive, you have to jump through some ridiculous hoops to move the recovery partition. Had they put it the other way around, it wouldn't have been 0 pain. Even with a healthy dose of cynicism, I really don't know what purpose this could serve.
A friend of mine recently installed windows to another drive (I hadn't had the chance to tell him to unplug every other drive) and sure enough, it did install with all of the funny partitions elsewhere. We though it will be easily fixable afterwards, but it's not - you cannot recreate it. With those gone the system cannot hibernate and it couldn't shut down until disabling fast startup. Updates don't work either, but it still tries doing them, fails rollbacks and restarts. Is it user error? Maybe, but I still blame the installer for not being clear and automatically picking a stupid setup.
I made the same mistake recently, Windows now uses the EFI partition on the Linux drive. But I don't have any of the problems listed. Not shutting down seems more like some ACPI issue to me.
My only problem is that BIOS updates delete the systemd-boot efistub, probably caused by the vendor only having exceptions for the Windows bootloader and GRUB.
I've had windows break my truecrypt disc. And this was recently.
Installed W10, after Fedora - Windows does a scanning and repairing drive and destroys a 1.5TB 60k hours drive with a full truecrypt disc encryption unrecoverable with the backed up TC headers. Annoying but not the end of the world. I've had issues with Windows installs in the past not knowing the file system on a drive and just using it. A reason which made me paranoid and I will always unplug drives I don't want used during a Windows install.
That only happened cause the disk appeared uninitialized to windows. Though I agree that it shouldn't touch any disks that aren't the install destination.
It's honestly behaving better than MBR since you don't need to boot a Linux liveUSB to fix the UEFI boot order. It requires some CMD commands but recovering (or heck, just installing) rEFInd is a rather painless affair compared to recovering a busted-up grub installation.
When you for example upgrade from windows 10 to 11, if your partitions are a mess it will shrink your main C partition to make room for a recovery partition at the end
Doesn’t really justify putting it at the end on fresh installs, but I guess they put ease of future automated repartitioning first
Windows 10 and 11 still breaks dual boot, had it happen with me in two different computers. Now I just have different computers with different OSes - had to get a second desk to be able to have all mounted in a way I don't need to swap computer cables.
The title says arch and I remember trying to install it once and it's just like 'connect to wifi' and dumps me at the command line.
I managed to figure it out by digging through documentation but the installation experience was extremely rough compared to every Windows version I can remember.
I tried installing it too, but oddly enough, it lacked drivers. Linux on the same machine runs flawlessly. I needed it for testing a new piece of software i am working on. I managed to install it after downloading a bunch of extras. Once installed it started downloading updates..and it went on and on and on. It’s such a low quality os it’s hilarious.
This is the situation with the upcoming 13-inch AMD Framework, by the way: apparently the official Windows 11 installation image doesn’t include drivers for the AMD/Mediatek RZ616 Wi-Fi card (2021), so they’re going to have to tell people to use Rufus to inject one. Fedora reportedly works out of the box.
It's mind-boggling that we have utterly basic fallback standards for storage (ATA, USB Storage Class), display (VGA), USB (xHCI), webcams (USB UVC), mice/touchpads/touchscreens/keyboards (PS/2, USB HID) or Bluetooth, with BIOS usually providing emulation layers for everything of that excluding webcams and bluetooth so you can theoretically take any modern x86 PC and hand-write a basic OS in Assembler if you want and have all of that sorted out, but nothing equivalent for networking (both wired and wireless) to make bootstrapping less of a pain.
Every OS, no matter if Windows, Linux or BSD, needs to bring a crapload of drivers and binary firmware blobs with it, just to make sure networking works.
There are multiple networking standards in USB, for example. Almost every USB ethernet dongle is using one of the USB standards for networking. Obviously, Windows didnt support any of these until relatively recently. They were too busy trying to promote "their" standard (RNDIS) which as usual practically nothing supported other than PocketPC and ... early Android.
Whenever you wonder "why dont we have a standard interface for X" the answer is, inevitably, Microsoft. They frequently refuse to provide builtin drivers for standard interfaces and, whenever they do, usually as second class citizens, _even_ when it is their own standard (e.g. MTP).
You cannot even imagine how much the extremely poor support has completely shaped todays smartphone OSes (e.g. the duality in android between media storage and user storage coming from being forced to fallback on Mass Storage) and why everyone used to complain how difficult it is to transfer files from an Android to a PC using a cable.
> They frequently refuse to provide builtin drivers for standard interfaces and, whenever they do, usually as second class citizens, _even_ when it is their own standard (e.g. MTP).
At least Windows comes with MTP support OOTB. macOS to this day doesn't.
It’s because all the wireless magic is in the dongle. I’m not entirely sure on the details but I think it just looks like a hub with potentially multiple hid attached to the host and bios etc have had rudimentary usb hid support for ages.
It's not a low quality OS in general; they just haven't really optimized the use case of people installing their OS from scratch.
Every organisation, commercial or otherwise, has finite resources. And the vast majority of their users would probably prefer they spend those limited resources on fixing things with a higher impact on them.
I imagine that very few people who use Windows have USBs on fat32. In fact, Windows format by defaults on NTFS with the option format on exFAT. There is no option fo format on FAT32, you need to use a specific tool. More so, most people just burn the iso to the usb, deleting everyhing on it.
Windows ISO files are iso9660, so you cannot "burn them" into the usb; only to optical drive.
For USB, Microsoft provides media creation tool, which will format the usb to FAT32, and then copy the files there. As said elsewhere in this thread, it will use esd instead of wim container, which has better compression, so it will fit.
The install USB can be neither NTFS nor exFAT, because neither of these filesystems are recognized by UEFI (as mandatory filesystem, by UEFI spec; yes, some implementations can recognize NTFS, but as a system vendor, you cannot rely on that). So if you want to boot it on a all systems, FAT32 is it.
He is wrong; UEFI does specify FAT (section 13.3). It does not prevent supporting other filesystems, as well as other partition schemes or volume formats (nothing prevents UEFI from supporting LVM, for example), but only FAT and GPT are mandatory (i.e. "must"). Thus only FAT and GPT are implemented in 100% of shipped computers.
Yes, you can get Intel NUC and yes, it does support NTFS in UEFI. It is also compliant with UEFI (i.e. "can"). But is is completely useless, if you are shipping media, that should be bootable by 100% of UEFI-using machines. It is usefull, only when you are targeting such machines specifically.
He frames it differently; more optimistic than the reality on the ground. He is also conflating things in a way that does not work (just because Intel ships something does not means that it is a standard to benchmark compliance to spec against it; it creates unnecessary confusion. Intel has a right to implement things above the spec, but it does not mean that spec mandates such things).
You can ship your own filesystems, volume managers, device drivers... but they should be signed with a key trusted by Secure Boot, if you want them to be useful at all. Most users are not going to disable SB for your snowflake of efi binary; especially if it is OS installer.
As a result, nobody (nobody in Spolsky's sense) really bothers. When you are shipping bootable media, fat is good enough. It will boot your binary, do stuff it is supposed to do, and everybody goes on with their lives.
> Most users are not going to disable SB for your snowflake of efi binary; especially if it is OS installer.
We have very different experiences, I must say. Mine is that Linux installers that do support Secure Boot are having to go out of their way to point that out to users because people are just disabling secure boot as step 0 by default.
That same page claims that disabling secure boot is no longer necessary (though most users are in fact used to it by now). It very much seems like the feature does actually just work in most cases.
> He is wrong; UEFI does specify FAT (section 13.3).
He literally addresses that. Saying that the one thing the Spec does is require that, at the very least, you can boot from FAT32.
When he says the spec doesn't require FAT32, he means nothing in the spec says your device itself should be FAT32 and that it's fully conformant to use a UEFI:NTFS driver to load from a USB stick.
And the only reason some UEFI implementsions support NTFS is as usual because of MS's monopoly. They don't have to specify it as the standard, it just becomes one.
Heck, NTFS is more commonly supported on UEFI implementstions than exFAT is, even when there is no free (as in gratis) implementation of the former, but there are several for the latter.
Of course you can. I open rufus, and I "burn" the ISO to the USB drive. I don't know if you are referring to a more specific process, or a different process, but the ISO is then copied to the USB, and I can boot from it, install windows, and even browse the files.
So, it does... but only if it's made using the media creation tool. ISOs or USBs made with MCT use the better compressed ESD format for the install archive. Only the direct ISO download uses the less-compressed WIM.
https://github.com/WoeUSB/WoeUSB - you give it an MS iso and where to put it on a USB stick and it will do the job using NTFS, which doesn't have snags with >4GB files.
You can just copy the files, there is no need for tools to prepare boot media. UEFI will look for efi/boot/bootx64.efi file (on x64 arch) on your removable drive and boot that. There are no magic boot sectors anymore.
The issue is with filesystems recognized by UEFI firmwares. The only mandatory filesystem is FAT32. Some implementations (e.g. Intel systems) can read NTFS, but unless you are targeting such a system specifically, you get to use FAT32, period.
And here comes the issue with the Microsoft's ISO files: the install.wim file is larger than 4 GB. It is possible to split it into multiple wim files, or recompress into esd archive (which is what the Microsoft's tool does), thus fitting into FAT32 limit.
- you want to boot in legacy mode (and your machine supports CSM)
- your UEFI firmware supports NTFS (only mandatory filesystem is FAT32).
Otherwise, if you want generic, UEFI boot media, you would have to find out how to boot from FAT32 partition and once your system runs, how to run installer from another partition.
There was a time when Linux distros tried to concur the desktop. For that they needed the normal user to re-install the OS. Windows never really had this challenge as Windows was and still is pre-installed.
To ease the self installation quite a few nice innovations were made. One is a easy and beautiful install process. Also remember the LiveCD and not sure if related but the UnionFS was also a smart idea to support LiveCD deployments.
anecdotally - I feel windows has gone the opposite direction and switched places with linux in terms of ease of installation. I've been using Linux for decades now but had to install Windows 11 for a gaming machine I built:
* I couldn't install windows 11 because it was "missing drivers" (this took me back to 95)
* Tried installing Windows 10 instead thinking to eventually upgrade to 11
* Got stuck in an update loop where it tried to install update named like 2H02 ~20 times (I wasn't paying attention to what it was actually updating and just kinda kept trying to update it until it was finished)
* Tried to troubleshoot the issue, tried a few things
* Gave up, installed ubuntu, checked how well the game works on Steam and it ran OK
At least in Germany all cheap USB sticks sold to average consumers in stores are still FAT32. I highly doubt they format different fs for different countries, the printing on the packaging indicates they're all sold EU-wide.
FAT32 is still very dominant & I wonder why Microsoft & Apple don't push the vendors to use exFAT. Users unaware of filesystems won't need their stick being recognized by the UEFI, but they will have files > 4GB.
Isn't it still a default somewhere? I recently formatted a pendrive on Windows and somehow mindlessly selected FAT (and ofc had troubles down the road). I probably picked a default somewhere. And to respond your question:
>Why on earth would you do that? People have been using exFAT for many years now.
Most people have no idea what FAT is. If presented a choicee between FAT, exFAT, NTFS and ext4 I'm certain they don't care, don't understand the implication, and would just click a random option. Which is OK, not everyone should be a IT expert, it's MS job to make the experience smooth.
edit: and a technical reason: i think FAT32 is the only guaranteed fs supported by UEFI
>If presented a choicee between FAT, exFAT, NTFS and ext4 I'm certain they don't care, don't understand the implication, and would just click a random option
I think it would be quite rare for someone who has no idea to even be presented with such a choice in the first place.
The Win10/11 setup uses 640x480 resolution or such nonsense on my system with 4k monitor, RX6*** card, so I have a teeny-tiny view of the interactive elements. Gave me a good laugh each time.
That is strange - I thought windows Media creator utility automatically formats usb to exactly what it needs. Even if i put I. fat32 or ext4 stick it'll create a working install.
The image contains the various editions (Home, Pro, etc) but only one language. Doesn't make sense to me as a company will like use one edition but possibly various languages.
I wonder how the pilots managed to consult this manual while wearing big bulky astronaut gloves.
There's so much raw data in the manual, I can't imagine they were expected to memorise it all. Though I'm sure you need to have a very good memory to qualify as an SR-71 pilot.
You could build this type of system with more sparsely placed nodes if you used HF communications, at which frequencies the waves reflect off the ionosphere [1].
Toybox provides the shell utilities. You can plug in a keyboard and mouse via the USB charging port. You can screencast to a TV via a Chromecast. Somehow you'd need to get a compilation toolchain on there.
It's an interesting idea IMO. For many people an Android device is their only computer... though I'm not aware of anyone doing this for real in the wild?