On Fri 12/May/2023 11:39:26 +0200 altoid via Dng wrote:
> On 12 May 2023 at 9:59, Alessandro Vesely via Dng wrote:
>
>> ... installed LibreOffice 5.4.7.2 and it works pleasantly well.
>
> Your OP says you want to use a pen drive.


Yup.


> Do you have a properly working USB port in that box?


Yup.


> Can it boot from a USB drive?


Nope.


> Check the BIOS settings for that.


Done, it can only boot from cdrom, floppy or hd. I wouldn't use the cdrom
because inserting disks in the drive can only be done by physically unmounting
the drive and removing its lid.


> If you can boot from a USB, burn a Devuan Live *.iso to a good
> quality pen drive and boot Devuan from there.
>
>> .. opened the CD drive to place an old Windows XP cdrom inside it.
>
> I thought you had problems with the CD-ROM drive.


I do.


> Does the CD drive work properly or not?


It can read the disk, but doesn't open the door.


> Can you boot from the CD-ROM?


Yup.


> Again, check the BIOS settings for that.
>
> If you can boot from CD, try burning a Devuan Live *.iso to a CD and
> boot from there.


It's not the easiest thing to do, also because I'm not familiar with CD
burning. That's why I installed win32-loader, but it's not very well documented:

ale@pcale:~$ dpkg -L win32-loader
/.
/usr
/usr/share
/usr/share/doc
/usr/share/doc/win32-loader
/usr/share/doc/win32-loader/THANKS
/usr/share/doc/win32-loader/changelog.gz
/usr/share/doc/win32-loader/copyright
/usr/share/win32
/usr/share/win32/win32-loader
/usr/share/win32/win32-loader/g2ldr
/usr/share/win32/win32-loader/g2ldr.mbr
/usr/share/win32/win32-loader.exe

ale@pcale:~$ file /usr/share/win32/win32-loader.exe
/usr/share/win32/win32-loader.exe: PE32 executable (GUI) Intel 80386 (stripped
to external PDB), for MS Windows, Nullsoft Installer self-extracting archive

Perhaps, it boots from the drive where it was loaded from? Perhaps it will
ask? One of the changelog comments says:

   * Download signed grub efi file of testing (bullseye) if the one
     of stable (buster) is faulty determined by its sha256 fingerprint

Hmm... What if I miss the network device driver?


Best
Ale
--