Hi everyone.

I've introduced Devuan to a friend who is not (yet) an accomplished Linux
geek, but he's been learning very fast. He's not real well-off financially,
so his two computers are old i386 laptops donated by friends. Neither of
these machines has a workable CD or DVD drive (ie one is a netbook and thus
no built-in DVD drive, the other has a DVD burner but is broken). Of
course, both machines have USB2 ports and can boot off of these.

In order to install, he downloaded file(s):

devuan_jessie_1.0.0-beta_i386_CD.iso

and

devuan_jessie_1.0.0-beta_i386_NETINST.iso

Installed to a usb stick as follows:

dd if=devuan_jessie_1.0.0-beta_i386_CD.iso of=/dev/sdb bs=4M
sync

But neither machine will boot either of these installed ISO files, even
after fiddling with BIOS parameters. However, at my suggestion he also
downloaded Refracta, which as all/most of you know is based on Devuan.
Refracta booted fine on both machines, and installed easily to the hard
drive.

Now I'm trying to wrap my head around why the Refracta ISO boots with ease
but Devuan doesn't. A little bit of online searching and I came upon this
info about isohydrid files...

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/mkusb/isohybrid

...and this possible solution to the problem...

http://www.syslinux.org/wiki/index.php?title=Isohybrid

But before suggesting this experiment to my friend, I thought I'd walk it
by the collective wisdom of this group. First, I have to ask: Are the
Devuan ISO files we download not already isohybrid enabled? Any other
possible reasons why the Refracta ISO files are USB bootable but the Devuan
files are not? Am I on the right track here, or have I missed the boat
entirely? Feel free to be merciless in your answers, I'm always happy to
learn.

cheers,
Robert