I'm an operating system fanatic. It's a pretty crazy obsession, really, as there doesn't seem to be much of a point, as I never have time to really dig into most of them. But DistroWatch.com is a favorite web site and I am forever downloading a new ISO to try it out on The Beast. It's nice to have a computer to just play Operating System Bingo on!
In order to play with operating systems, you need to have a boot manager you are happy with, in order to pick which OS to boot into at any given time. This even has some work-related benefits, as I usually work at a multi-OS place, even if it is just to boot into various flavors of Windows. Of course, for testing purposes, these days it is much more cost-efficient to use a virtual machine, like VMWare, Virtual PC, or QEMU, but that's a discussion for another day (yup, I'm addicted to virtualization too). Boot managers allow you to easily pick a partition to boot into and they give you native speed and efficiency once you're there.
In the past, I was a huge fan of System Commander. It was my boot manager of choice for many many years. It was easy to install, looked good, quickly and painlessly found installed OSes and noticed new ones without a hiccup. It is very flexible and supports many different and obscure installations. But a few years ago, I started having graphical problems. I think they started getting too fancy with their display and it impacted its flexibility. Some of my machines just displayed garbage when booting into System Commander. And tech support was not successful in solving my problem, so I began to cast about for a new boot manager.
And so about 4 years ago, I began to use BootIt NG, a shareware boot manager. While not quite as smooth as System Commander at its peak, it at least works on every machine I've thrown at it. It is also not quite as successful in noticing new installations as System Commander, requiring a bit more work to add a new OS boot. And I've also had problems getting it to pick a CD and boot from it. But overall I've been very happy with it so far, and continue to recommend it (as frequent readers of this blog will no doubt notice!).
The other major contender for the boot manager crown is GAG, an Open Source program, often recommended in the PC-BSD forums, as the native FreeBSD loader, boot0 ("Boot Easy" (sic)) is pretty, no, make that incredibly, bare bones and simplisitic. So I decided to check it out to see if it could replace BootIT NG. And the short answer is "Not a snowball's chance in Hell."
While GAG purports to be an easy "graphical" way of doing a boot loader, I don't see it at all. While it will list your partitions, it gives you no virtually information about them at all:
- A Boot From Floppy
- B A5h FreeBSD
- C 63h
- D 63h
- E 83h Linux EXT2
- F 82h
Is the screen I see on booting The Beast. The black lines are primary partitions, while the blue ones are extended partitions (I have Kubuntu installed on the last partition). Not sure what the "63h" means. Not very user friendly, really. Although I suppose the case could be made that anyone messing with a boot manager should have enough knowledge to work through this. But it isn't really good enough for me. Not when I can spend a mere US$35 and get BootIT NG, which also contains a rudimentary partition manager too - worth it to me!
There is also a standard Linux boot loader called GRUB, but that requires editing some text files and offers no help whatsoever. Thanks, but I'll stick with BootIT NG.
Another Open Source boot loader I found is called Gujin. It looks promising based upon the web page, but pretty much demands a running Linux in order to install it and I'm not ready for that yet. But I hope to have some time in the near future to check it out.
This is a good looking set of pages on dual booting using GRUB, if you can deal with it:
How-To Dual Boot FreeBSD, Linux, and OpenBSD with GNU Grub
And of course, the FreeBSD Handbook is the real source for info on how BSD boots:
Bootstrapping BSD
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