As I mentioned in the first post I have booted ISO's from Deb on the HDD for a couple of years now, but I have never used the grml utitility. Today I decided to test it on LL 3.4 to see if it was available and would work. It's so simple and fast I nearly thought I was mistaken. The list of good things is long.
1) It is available for LL 3.4. Type grml into the search box in synaptic. When the pckages appear select grml-rescueboot and install it.
2) Download an ISO of choice and save it to downloads. Open Thunar as administrator and copy the ISO file. Go to /boot/grml/ and paste the ISO there.
3) Run sudo update-grub and a grml boot ISO option will be written to grub. Logout. Reboot and select the grml ISO boot entry. On ISO's with sophisiticated installers a boot option to run the live system or to install the system will appear. I tested this with an Ubuntu LTS 16.04 ISO on the oldest 32bit machine I have available to me running LL 3.4 and it worked perfectly, and will work for many ISOs, probably all of them that use an Ubuntu installer. It will probably work with Deb live too, but I NEVER recommend Deb live ISOs for the installation of Debian. In the case of Ubuntu based systems that offer the option in the installer to install, you can install to your hardrive easily from the grml boot entry.
4) For testing or distro hopping grml-rescuedisk is a very helpful little boot utility.
5) Live systems load and run much faster from the HDD than from a DVD, especially on older hardware.
I recommend this utility for all LL users who like to distro hop out of curiosity, and for a simple way to keep bootable forensic utilities and rescue ISOs on your HDD. The old HP I tested this on, was 32bit MOBO, 1g of RAM and a 3g processor. This is a nice alternative for older machines without available hardware vitualization. Try it out.
TC
