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I know this doesn't belong here most likely but I'm going to post it anyways.
It's sad that in today's tech era, a person with a visual impairment isn't able to install another OS completely on their own. The boot menu, (the thing you need to access in order to boot from an external drive) is yet to become accessible enough for a blind person to use.
I know that the boot menu/bios need to remain as stripped down as they can, but if that's the case, shouldn't there be a way to boot from USB directly from your OS of choice?
7 months ago · 👍 negepezzannyitfiam, little_ham, lykso, gwenprime, mntn
I agree, this is how I got started on Linux (with LiveCDs) back when computers would still boot from CDROMs by default. Maybe that's why they made it harder to do! You ould try one of the ARM devices like the Raspberry Pi, Pine64, or Hardkernel devices. Most of these boot from an SD card if it is present. · 7 months ago
@mntn that's the sad truth. My question is, if they are not able to build in accessibility into a boot-loader, couldn't they at the very least make a way for people to change the boot order? for example, say you had a bootable live cd of linux mint, there could be an application that allows you to boot into the disk at restart or move it above the list so it attempts to boot the USB first. Just some ideas... · 7 months ago
Although now I see that you are talking about rebooting from Windows into an installer... a whole other can of worms. To my knowledge there are zero bootloaders with any kind of accessibility. This paper has a proposal but it seems like one of those research things that is at an early stage: https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.03186. · 7 months ago
In fact the Debian installer has numerous ways to support accessibility including USB braille devices and speech support. See https://wiki.debian.org/accessibility#Debian_installer_accessibility. But I agree that generally more distros should try to provide this level of support. · 7 months ago
If your terminal supports a screen reader, and if the distro you are booting includes serial output by default, you could use a serial to USB dongle to install it that way. Many distros (including Debian I believe) support text-based installation over serial. · 7 months ago
@lykso what prompted this post was the fact that I was trying to install Linux on my home computer from windows. Sadly no way I know of on windows to start directly from USB without entering the boot menu itself · 7 months ago
Booting directly from one Linux into another is possible using "kexec." I don't know if other OSes have similar functionality.
A quick search turned up a Bash script someone wrote that tries to parse a grub.cfg file, present its boot options, and then use kexec to boot into the item chosen. It has a "--root" flag that takes the location of an alternative GRUB root, so I imagine it can be used to boot into a Linux on a USB stick. Haven't used it myself.
https://github.com/atomt/kexec-grub-helper · 7 months ago