Episode: 644
Title: HPR0644: The Plop Boot Loader and UNetbootin- A Great Team
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0644/hpr0644.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 00:19:35

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Music
Hello everyone, this is N50.
In this episode of HPR, I would like to share with you all a really neat combination of
re-software applications that I view here in the shop to help me overcome some rather
large obstacles when it comes to revitalizing some older PCs.
These software programs allow me to install any operating system on any computer through
the miracle of the USB flash drive, even if the destination computer's bias does not
have today's luxury of being able to boot from a USB drive.
Before I get into the meat of the matter, my thanks go out to everyone here at HackriPublic
Radio who have contributed in the past, as well as those who will be contributing to future
episodes after this one.
I would also especially like to thank Mr. Ken Fallon for all he has done for the longevity
of HPR and his continued enthusiasm and passion for podcasting in general, which is reflected
within each of his own episodes and all the interviews with him from our fellow podcasters
throughout our podcasting community.
Okay, now from my story.
I've been villain with computers and messing around with various operating systems and
assembling computers for about the last ten years or so.
I find it both interesting and exciting to hear that so many of us here at HPR are the
local FixIt kind of people, or as I like to say, the ones who are always volunteered
to work in everyone else's computers, because we have either fixed our computer intentionally
or accidentally in the past.
I always seem to be building a small and expensive computer system from parts that are laying
around here in the shop.
These parts have either been given to me from people that have upgraded their systems
with faster ones, or consider them simply trash because they have gotten slow in time
due to malware, spyware, viruses, or anything else that goes wrong, and yes, most of them
started their lives as windows PCs.
I guess over time, words seem just gotten around that I take in these things like stray
animals, and the original owners had rather found a new home for them rather than to just
get rid of them.
For a number of reasons I won't continue to bore you with here.
It seemed like every month or so, I seem to have accumulated enough spare parts, if you
will, to be able to spend several hours over some weekend picking through all these spare
supplies and being able to put together some kind of a decent little machine that makes
a great candidate for installing either a Linux or BSD operating system on it, making
this new system entirely functional and practical once again.
I usually end up simply giving these computers away to new internet users, kids from the school
that my daughters go to, or the people who otherwise would not have the money to buy
one.
Primarily, I install various flavors of Linux on them for all the ones I give away, but
I have been known to use free BSD or open BSD on some of them for creating dedicated home
network gateways, routers, firewalls, content filters, mail servers, media servers, or even
a few file servers with various raid setups in them.
Some major drawback I ran into several times in the creation of these machines is the fact
I'm always searching around for a working CD-ROM drive, either one to dedicate to the system
that's being built, or to simply bar one for a few minutes to move forward with the installation
of the operating system.
And not all times, will there be a CD-ROM available to install in the system, because it will
be dedicated on the headless server or a factory in that most of the time it's a finished
system, will be having a DVD-ROM drive upon completion.
Further issues are one, from a distro hopper when it comes to Linux distribution two.
I like to install the very latest and greatest distribution that is available at the time
of install.
And three, I'm sure I'm not alone here when I say my collection of coffee cup coasters
is rather large, with all the outdated distribution ISOs, burn on CD-ROMs that are simply
accumulated over the last six months or so.
Knowing there had to be a better way to go about all this, and hearing the benefits of
flash drive installation is not only installing faster, as well as reducing the cost and hassle
of burning each ISO image I wanted to work out a solution.
This is easy, most of you are probably thinking, but remember, I'm dealing with older laptops
and PCs that cannot boot from any USB device because of non-existent options for such in
their BIOS.
Now here's a cool part, I found an extremely small ISO image of a CD-ROM boot manager
that will allow any machine that has USB port on it to now be able to boot from the USB
drive, regardless if the system BIOS supports it.
This free software is called Plop PLOP boot manager, and is written by a guy in Australia.
Use your favorite search engine with the keyword Plop Boot Manager, and you can then download
the zip file, extract it, and simply burn the PLPBT.ISO file that's inside that archive
onto a CD-ROM disk.
The second part of the solution I've come across, or that I use quite a bit, is software
application called UNEP booting.
UNEP booting website states UNEP booting allows you to create bootable live USB drives
for Ubuntu, Fedora, and other Linux distributions without burning a CD.
It runs on both Windows and Linux.
You can either let UNEP boot and download one of the many distributions supported out
of the box for you or simply your own Linux ISO.
Well, again, use your favorite search engine or local repository to download or install
UNEP booting.
It's pretty common on most of the distributions that I've found, and such are the ones listed
earlier when I read off UNEP booting website.
I keep all Linux and BSD distribution ISO files on my network's file server, and simply
use them as the source each time I run UNEP booting.
Along with these software applications, I have a couple of 4GB USB flash drives that
have seen many distributions flash across them.
I've met my saved expenses for not having to buy CDs or DVDs, have already paid for
these two flash drives by using the combination of these two software applications.
Just today, I wanted to install the latest version of ZenWalt Linux onto an older HP
laptop and discovered it did not have an option for booting from a USB drive.
I rounded up my well-used one CD-ROM boot disk with plot on it, booted the laptop and
shows the USB drive option at the bottom of the menu, and from there I ran the setup from
ZenWalt 6.4 Genome without a problem from the 4GB USB flash drive.
In less than 10 minutes, I had a new operating system on the laptop from a USB install on
a machine that did not originally have the option to do so.
I realized there are probably several other ways to go about the process of doing all this,
but I found that for simplicity's sake and speed, this combination with a plot boot manager
and UNEP booting has always worked successfully for me.
Grub is another choice that comes to mind right now for a boot manager capable of doing
this, but there are more steps involved and then the fact that maybe we're not going
to be installing an operating system on it that favors the Grub or has Grub as a default
boot loader.
Anyway, this is what I use and I thought sharing this information here on HBR might help
others with their tasks as well.
Thanks for listening and have a great day.
I got to walk up this morning, we had them stay for a few.
I love doing a color brand one, brand four, had them two.
Thank you for listening to Hack with Public Radio, HBR is sponsored by Carol.net, so head
on over to C-A-R-O dot-A-C for all of us here.
Thanks for listening to Hack with Public Radio, HBR is sponsored by Carol.