Well, boot-132 has been with us for what seems like forever, but somehow it's takeoff has been less than rocketlike.. I'm left wondering why..

For DIY purposes, handling optical media is clumsy and people have difficulty with disk images within disk images containing kextcaches of kexts that need to be loaded with keystrokes etc etc.

I have long figured that the answer lay in USB sticks due to their writability and flexibility, but the inability to boot optical media neccessitated a number of workarounds such as copying the retail DVD to USB media or booting a stripped-down osx. this too complicated the DIY approach.

but hang on....

USB sticks *can* boot the retail DVD..

XPC can boot the retail dvd from usb, but it's gone into the workshop to be rebuilt into something new, available "anytime now" at the time of writing...

Chameleon 2 can boot the retail dvd from a usb stick, but only in the lab and we're unlikely to see it in the wild anytime soon due to the APSL.

Think Boot can boot the retail dvd from usb, but apparently it has some bugs and no-one knows quite what why or how because its chinese, has no docs and no source. (this seems a bit unfair, as it is based on boot-132 like chameleon, but being chinese it ignores the license issues that chameleon suffers with...)

GRUB2 can probably boot the retail dvd from a usb stick, but the xnu support is so fresh that no-one appears to have tried it.

so there are 4 options for building the holy grail, none of which are quite the fruitful solution to all our problems that they could be.

OK, so even assuming that the idea of DIY boot-132 is too much work for the average noob, the possibility of using optical preboot media is still very real, and easier than ever with chameleon 2 cdboot removing a whole stage which previously had to use grub/isolinux/syslinux, (or who knows, even GRUB2?) yet this too has remained largely the domain of the knowledgeable, and barring my bug-ridden proof-of-concept lifeboat13 cd, and the strange offering from pcwiz whose name I don't recall, no-one has attempted to make anything out of thios raw tech...

So how come no-one has taken up the challenge of making a really cool preboot disc?

• Are the masses really so stupid that anything beyond "click 'next' to install" is beyond them?
• Is it just that producing prepatched DVDs is such a brilliant ego-boost to those who insist on perpetuating this tiger-era install method?
• Is making a "smart" preboot disc/stick/whatever somehow less appealing or less glamorous than the full-sized multi-GB pirated disc?

I really couldn't tell you... all I know is that all this time after the initial dfe/boot-132 breakthrough the technique still remains amazingly underdeveloped and as a consequence.. people are still falling back to the bad old ways..

I guess habit dies hard.

Agree with Hagar.

Myself and Galaxy did have a plan to put together a 'universal' preboot CD with a menu and different, preconfigured minimal environments for various hardware configs (eg Intel vs AMD, SSE2 vs SSE3 etc).

But... well, I ran out of time, and the will to see it through.

FWIW, I still think its a good idea...

- munky

I'll have to check and see if I still have the files in some deep, dark corner of (one of) my HDDs.

Might consider 'open sourcing' it

Having boot 132 on the USB stick works rather well also.

I have an 8gb stick, which 2 partitions, a small one with fat32 with syslinux installed along with the boot132 stuff...

I have a 2nd 7gb HFS partition on the stick, containing the 10.5 retail DVD.

It works really well, in fact I have customised the Syslinux.cfg file to allow booting more than one set of extensions, by using the menu system to choose between .IMG files to boot.

I'm surprised more people have not gone for this route as it allow me to install leopard in around 20 mins.

I was using that method almost a year ago - it's off-topic to this thread, which is about booting the DVD from a USB stick. The fact that there are methods that work around this limitation is not relevant.