Is Fedora Plasma a stand alone OS or does it have to be installed in conjunction with something else?
I downloaded the Fedora-KDE-Desktop-Live-42-1.1.x86_64.iso zip file and after I unzipped everything I copied it to a USB drive that had been prepared with Ventoy and I was unable to boot up with it.
Welcome to the forum!
You should be able to boot directly into the Live ISO, use the live system, and from that system install Fedora permanently onto the machine.
When you say “unable to boot up with it”, exactly what issue are you seeing?
The official way to make a bootable USB is to use the Fedora Media Writer tool, but in practise many people do seem to use Ventoy.
That ISO file is the entire operating system, display manager, utilities, and so on. Entirely stand-alone from your perspective.
What do you actually see when you insert that USB stick with Ventoy on it - does Ventoy start, display the ISO’s it has available and allow you to select one to boot, or do you get nothing?
The official way to create a Live USB stick is to use the Fedora Media Writer, but I type this from a system installed using Ventoy, and I have a number of other ISO’s on there which I can boot from alternatively, if I want to try something else out or see what’s recently changed in Ubuntu, Fedora Silverblue or any other operating system for that matter.
I get nothing. The Ventoy screen I’m expecting does not appear at all.
Actually, where did you get this file from?
The official download gives you the ISO file directly - there is nothing to unzip.
Is the file I downloaded meant to be unzipped? Or do I just copy it as is onto the ventoy drive?
I’m probably going to try the Fedora Media writer, but I thought ventoy was supposed to be as easy as drag and drop.
I don’t use Ventoy but as I understand it, you would just copy the ISO file itself to the Ventoy drive.
That is where I downloaded it from. I’m getting the feeling I wasn’t supposed to “unzip” it. But when I copied it as is to the ventoy drive I wasn’t able to boot up.
By the way I’ve successfully booted up with cinnamon, but I’m trying to try out as many distros as possible before I settle on a single one.
With cinnamon I created a bootable drive using rufus, but then someone from Cinnamon’s forum suggest that if I was going to try out multiple distros to use ventoy.
I tried and it didn’t work. I’ll probably use the media writer instead.
It is - there’s nothing to unzip - you just put the ISO file onto the partition of the USB stick you can actually see.
─🎩 lurcher media/steve/Ventoy
├─
└─➜ ls -al 17:36 Sun 26-Oct
Permissions Size User Date Modified Name
drwxr-xr-x@ - steve 26 Oct 17:36 .
drwxr-x---@ - root 26 Oct 17:36 ..
drwxr-xr-x@ - steve 22 Oct 20:03 'System Volume Information'
.rwxr-xr-x@ 483M steve 29 Sep 2023 clonezilla-live-20230426-lunar-amd64.iso
.rwxr-xr-x@ 2.5G steve 22 Oct 11:20 Fedora-Cinnamon-Live-x86_64-42-1.1.iso
.rwxr-xr-x@ 2.6G steve 22 Oct 11:26 Fedora-COSMIC-Live-42-1.1.x86_64.iso
.rwxr-xr-x@ 1.7G steve 22 Oct 11:06 Fedora-i3-Live-x86_64-42-1.1.iso
.rwxr-xr-x@ 2.8G steve 22 Oct 11:22 Fedora-KDE-Desktop-Live-42-1.1.x86_64.iso
.rwxr-xr-x@ 1.8G steve 22 Oct 11:15 Fedora-LXDE-Live-x86_64-42-1.1.iso
.rwxr-xr-x@ 1.9G steve 22 Oct 11:16 Fedora-LXQt-Live-42-1.1.x86_64.iso
.rwxr-xr-x@ 2.5G steve 22 Oct 11:13 Fedora-MATE_Compiz-Live-x86_64-42-1.1.iso
.rwxr-xr-x@ 1.9G steve 22 Oct 11:23 Fedora-MiracleWM-Live-42-1.1.x86_64.iso
.rwxr-xr-x@ 1.7G steve 22 Oct 11:13 Fedora-Sway-Live-x86_64-42-1.1.iso
.rwxr-xr-x@ 2.4G steve 22 Oct 11:17 Fedora-Workstation-Live-42-1.1.x86_64.iso
.rwxr-xr-x@ 2.3G steve 22 Oct 11:21 Fedora-Xfce-Live-42-1.1.x86_64.iso
.rwxr-xr-x@ 4.6G steve 27 Jul 2022 'Windows 10 Full.iso'
That’s what I figured. But I copied Ubuntu, Fedora and Zorin onto the ventoy drive and was unable to get it to work. I’m not getting the ventoy screen giving me the option to choose which OS to boot from.
Have you configured your BIOS to look for a USB to boot from before it looks for SATA disks? If the BIOS never gets to see the USB before something else has declared itself a boot volume, you’ll be widdling into the wind…
Yes, that was the first thing I did.
Perhaps force it to boot the USB by selecting the boot override in the BIOS itself. If it still fails to see the bootable partition then, then you have something not set up correctly with the USB stick itself. Ventoy should take care of this for you, creating a small EFI partition where the boot loader lives and reads the ISO’s you have dropped off in the second, much larger partition.
Might be worth getting it working just so you have an easy means of getting a recovery system up… or sack the entire thing off and use the media writer to create a bootable USB drive and move on from Ventoy.
Yeah I think going to move on from ventoy.
Why not use the Fedora Media Writer? It’s available for Windows, Mac and Linux. On Windows, Rufus works very well too if you want to burn other distros.
There is no need to prepare anything or unzip the ISO, that’s not how you’re supposed to burn bootable ISOs to a USB drive. It may sometimes work if you just copy the contents of the ISO to a USB disk, but that’s not the correct way.
Just run Fedora Media Writer or Rufus and burn the ISO directly to the USB drive.
That’s what I’m planning to do. I got seduced by the idea of being able to load up several distros onto a single USB drive, but I’m going to use the Fedora Media Writer now.
We have bush!
Now I gotta figure out to install software.
Thank you to all who responded so quickly to my question. All the feedback I got was extremely helpful.
Use the Discover application to update the system and to find and install software and applications.
Inside Discover settings, add the Flathub repo as many apps come only as Flatpaks these days.
Thank you. I’ll give that a try.