 So first off, if you hear other people talking, my wife is doing school with the kids in the next room, but this is my time and opportunity to make this video, so I apologize for a background of people talking to you here. So today we're going to download a couple ISOs and put them on a flash drive. This flash drive right here that I bought for my friend Andrew, I'm going to be hopefully dropping it off to him later today, which is one of the reasons I'm going to do this video right now. And it's one of those ones that's standard USB on one side and USB-C on the other so you can plug it into his phone or even newer devices with USB-C. Now a couple of weeks ago I showed you how you can use WGet to download an ISO directly to a drive, not just download it as a file, but actually flash it to that drive or image it to that drive because on Linux, since it's a UNIX-like operating system and UNIX and UNIX-like operating systems in general, everything is a file, all your hardware files, your flash drive is just a file and you can write directly to it. There are a couple problems with doing it that way. You know, it's something I show you so you know how to do it in case you need to do it, for example, you don't have room to download it somewhere else. But there's issues you can't do and, you know, an MD5 hash check on it to make sure that you've downloaded the proper file, you know, and there's no man-in-the-mill stuff going on, but also anytime you download an ISO and you image it that way using CAT or DD, which are the standard ways of doing it, the problem with it is something like this, which is a 65-gig flash drive, if you download a one-and-a-half-gig or a two-gig ISO and you flash it over, at that point you're making your computer think that this is a CD-ROM drive and it's not going to be writable. So even though you have 64 gigs on a drive like this, you're writing a gig and a half to it and the rest of it is just unwriteable and it's good for booting a system, but you can't save anything to it or add anything to it without wiping out what's on there. We don't want to do that. Now, in the past, I showed you on my Keychain, which I actually have the same exact drive on my Keychain, I used Grub 2. Grub 2 is a bootloader and you can load up ISOs into a folder on it and point to it. The thing is that that's kind of a pain in the butt because you have to configure it and you have to know the configuration set up for each ISO. So if you don't know it already, you have to, you know, mount your ISO, look at the config files for it, see what the kernel's called, where it's at, where the initial RAM disk is and where it's at. So you have to be able to know all that to configure that. Today we're going to look at something called Ventoy. Ventoy is an open source application. It is the simplest way to have a multi-boot drive that is still writable and it's compatible with many, many different operating systems, including certain Linux or certain Windows ISOs and even Android. So today I'm going to install a couple of Linux distros on here, some lightweight ones, some heavier ones and also an Android on there so that Andrew has all that as well as some tools. And the great thing is, again, I can install, you know, five or six different distros on there and use five or six gigs and they're still going to be, you know, 55 gigs or 60 gigs left on this drive for him to write to. So let's go ahead, super, super easy to use and we're even going to look at a little bit on how it works. So again, this is a, you know, a standard flash drive, USB on one side and then you flip it around and it's actually got USB-C on the other so that you can plug it into your phone, which is really nice. And so I'm just going to plug this into my computer right here. And of course it's very important I know which drive that is on my system, so there's multiple ways to check this. I'm just going to, you know, check my dev folder, SD, whatever. So I have it plugged in right now. I'm going to go ahead unplug this and then try to do tab completion again and you can see SDD has disappeared. So this is my SDD device and then plug it back in and double check again. I'll hit tab and there we go. So now I know that is that device. So I want to make sure that I'm picking that device when I'm formatting the drive. Next we'll go to ventoy.net and this is their website. Let's go ahead and go to test ISO. So we can see a list of operating systems they've tested this with. So here we go. This is a long list of ISOs, Linux distros, Windows distros, if you call it a Windows distro, versions of Android and other operating systems as well, you know, BSD operating systems and whatnot. It is a long list that they have tested with. You can also see that they've tested it with legacy, UEFI and what type of environment they tested in, whether it's a virtual environment or on physical hardware. Next we'll go to downloads and under the downloads section you can see that we have some options here. So you can see you download directly from the Ventoy website but you can also go to the GitHub page and look at their releases as well. So you can also see that at the time of recording this the newest release is two days old. They're constantly updating this and adding new operating systems that it supports. Currently it says new support for a total of 450 plus operating systems. I'm gonna download the Linux tar GZ of this latest release, save it to my computer. And I've created an empty directory called Ventoy that I'm gonna download this tar GZ to. And once I've navigated to that directory I'm going to extract it, which only takes a second and now I'm going to navigate into the directory that I created, I'll list out the files here. And as you can see, there is a file called ventoy2disk.sh. Now as always when you're downloading something from a website, be sure you trust where you get it from, who you're getting it from and the matter you're getting it in that you got it in a secure manner. There's no man in the middle of the text. Now that being said, it's also a good idea. There's a lot of files in here but it's a basic SH file, a basic shell script. It's not a bad idea to look through it. It's not very long. It basically is gonna format the drive and install an image to it. So I do recommend looking through some of the files but I know most of you probably won't. But let's go ahead and run that script. Now, because it's going to want to flash the drive we are going to have to run it as sudo or root if your user doesn't already have permission which they shouldn't, a normal user shouldn't have permissions to format drive. So let's go ahead and give that a try. So I'm gonna sudo ventoy2disk and we are greeted with some basic help options here. So obviously we're gonna have to run this script, give it the device that we want, not the partition but the actual device itself. And then you have options here. If it's already installed, you can install, you can reinstall by doing dash capital I or you can update if you wanted to update your ventoy install. We're just going to do a basic install here. So I'm gonna sudo.slashr script dash I and again, my device in my particular case is SDD. But again, that may be different for you. Make sure you are choosing the proper drive. It's going to ask you twice to make sure that you have the right drive. So you can see it does give you information. This is a SanDisk drive, which is good. It's the only SanDisk drive I have plugged in right now. So I'm, you know, know that I have the right drive. Even though it's 64 gig, it's showing as a 57. You know how all that works. And it's asking you to press yes to continue. So why? And it's going to ask you again, double check, make sure you have the right drive because it's going to format and repartition it. I'll hit Y and it's going to go. It is going to create the partitions. It's going to set the master boot record so it's bootable. And now it's going to install Ventoy to that drive. And it's done. That didn't take very long at all. Now, if I open up my file manager, you can see there's a drive now called Ventoy. I can click on that. It's mounted and there is nothing in it. It is completely empty. Now all you have to do is copy over some ISOs to this drive and it will boot them for you. You can put them pretty much anywhere. It seems to scan the whole drive. So you can put it in the root directory, but I usually create a folder called ISOs or ISO and put my ISOs in there. So let me go ahead and do that real quick. Okay, so I'm copying over about five gigs worth of files. While those files are copying over, let me talk a little bit about what's going on. Okay, so we see this partition. This partition seems to have no files on it, but there is a second partition, a hidden partition that is a bootable partition. Most operating systems are not going to show up by default, although we can see it on our lick system if we look for it. So it's a very small partition that seems to have grub and your Ventoy files on it. On my particular distribution, I want to even change the backgrounds for the boot screen. So what happens is it's going to search your flash drive for ISOs and then it will list them. You pick it and it mounts it and boots it, which, and it's super simple. At any point, you can add new ISOs to it. You just drag and drop them onto the flash drive. Again, also I still have the rest of this drive to write to. Depending on the distribution, when you boot one of these ISOs, you may or may not be able to mount the flash drive. But in general purpose, this flash drive is writable and there are ways to make persistent partitions on it if you wanted to go that route. But again, there's that second small partition that most operating systems aren't going to see. Now, I let someone borrow a flash drive the other day that had some files on it for them and they plugged it into a Chromebook and Chrome actually showed both partitions on there. So just be aware of that. But yeah, that's pretty much it. It's going to install grub the bootloader onto one partition, a hidden partition that starts up the Ventoy bootloader operating system that searches the drive for other ISOs and it does a pretty good job of it. Now, on my particular flash drive, I actually have a couple, you know, hundreds of files on there because I have a whole bunch of programs and stuff, hundreds and hundreds of files, that's a couple of gizglogs and I find that it takes Ventoy on my flash drive, maybe about five seconds for it to boot, but it's like it starts off and you have a black screen for five seconds, which is a very long time to have a black screen. I think it's just searching through all those files for an ISO. But we'll see when these files are done copying up over, we'll boot it up and we'll see how long it takes to boot when there's nothing but those ISOs on there. So real quick, while those last few files are copying over, I'm just going to run the mount command here and as you can see, SDD1 is mounted as Ventoy, but if I list out list dev, SDD and all that, it's going to show that there is a second partition on there, which is not mounted by default on my operating system. I can use fdisk dash L dev SDD, and it's going to tell me I need to be pseudo for that. You can see that there are two partitions. One is 32 megabytes and it's an EFI partition, which is basically the bootable hidden partition on there. I can mount it, pseudo mount dev SDD2, I'll just put it at MNT, and I can move into MNT and list out the files here. And as you can see here, it's got grub and the Ventoy files. So again, these are the main folders on that hidden partition. I can go into the grub one and go to themes and look under Ventoy, and you can see there is a PNG here that is the main background and some other PNGs in here. And on my particular distribution, I changed that background, or on my particular flash drive, I changed that background. So that's something you can modify, but there's no need to, just bring it up that you can do it. So let's go ahead and unmount that partition. It's warning me that the other partition is still mounted. I'll move out of that directory and check again with mount. And yep, so that's still mounted. So pseudo, U mount, MNT for me. Now I can hold down this and pull this one out. And now I'm going to go ahead and plug it into a USB drive on my little think pad here, start it up and press whatever keys you need to boot from a device. In this particular case on this computer, it's F12. And I will choose that. There you go, it loaded pretty quick. Again, on mine, it takes about five seconds for the screen to come up. And I think it's just because I have so many files on my drive. And you can see here, they're listed in alphabetical order. And of course they're just listing the names of the ISO. So you can always rename those if you want to simplify them. But let's go ahead and I'm just going to choose MX Linux. Go ahead and enter. And it actually boots it into the MX Linux bootloader, which doing other methods such as the grub install I did on my flash drive before, I had to, it skipped all that, which MX Linux gives you a lot of really good boot options at that screen. And I was missing out on that on my flash drive before. But with Ventoy, it works no problem. And at this point, it's booting up just like it would from any other ISO. And there we go, the desktop is loading. Let's go ahead and restart it and try one of the other distributions. Computer's restarting, going into the USB drive. And again, Ventoy will start up. We'll quickly see at the top of the screen little grub loading. There we go. And here we go. This time I'm going to choose, the first option here is Android Linux. And again, Android boots a little slow. So yeah, that took about two minutes and we're just now getting to the loading screen here and Trebuchet always got it. And there we go. I've got Linux or Android, which is Linux, running on my laptop here. And you can see it does have the Google applications installed, which Lineage OS doesn't buy default normally in the Play Store and whatnot. So yeah, very good if you wanted to test out some applications and you don't want to do it on your main phone or other device. So hopefully you got the general idea. Just running that script, installs it to the flash drive. You know, it repartitions it and everything for you. Again, if you already have it installed and you're trying to reinstall it, you have to either do the force install and it'll completely reinstall it or update, but it tells you all that in that main little help option. There's also, you might want to go to the Ventoy website because there are setting, you know, if you use secure boot, you're gonna want to choose secure boot options when you're installing it. By default, that's disabled. I usually disable secure boot on all my machines anyway, because I, whatever. But yeah, super simple, super easy. Anytime I want to add a new distribution, I can just copy over the ISO to that flash drive, anywhere on the flash drive. And as long as it's a supported version ISO that it uses, which as you saw over 450 ISOs are supported, including some Windows ISOs, which I have not done myself, but it is an option. So check it out. It is the simplest and easiest way I have found to have a multi-boot drive that is still writable and, you know, there's really no configuration to it. It's just drag and drop. Thanks again, and I hope you all have a great day.