How Well Does 'Smart BootManager' Work?

iie1195 asks: "Even though you can set up LiLO to dual-boot operating systems, in my opinion, there are better and easier ways to accomplish this, since LiLO isn't very newbie-friendly. There are several commercial boot-managers out there. Among the noteworthy are PQBoot from Powerquest and System Commander 2000 from V Communications (you can read a review on System Commander 2000 here.) Open Source boot-managers have not been plentiful, but there's hope. One of these is Smart BootManager. It has the look and feel of an early version of System Commander, and is fully Open Sourced. I have not tried it much myself, since I'm perfectly happy with System Commander. But since blowing $49 on a boot-manager might be a little steep, the free Smart BootManager seems like a good alternative." Any experiences or testimonials from users of this program? Does it serve your booting needs or are there areas that could use improvement?

Re:it works

[eyeball]

as well as reaganomics

have you tried grub?

[fsck!]

grub is the boot manager designed for GNU/Hurd, but i'm using it on two linux-only systems and it works very well. it supports fancy menus, network booting, and a command line that feels a lot like a boot monitor. the best part is, it runs without a config file. the boot loader understands ext2, reiser, fat32 and more, nativly. hell it even does command history and autocomplete. you can give it a config file of course, but the point is you can just tell it:


grub> kernel (hd0,0)/usr/src/linux/arch/i386/boot/bzImage
grub> boot


i don't remember the exact URL, but i think it's something like this [gnu.org]. i should point out that the version in debian potato is sorta baked. build the latest one from source if possible.

GAG

[MadPhatTim]

Have you tried GAG? It is certainly the coolest looking boot manager I've ever seen and it's free (speach and beer).

http://raster.cibermil lennium.com/gageng.htm [cibermillennium.com]

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XOSL

[King of the World]

Try XOSL [xosl.org], it's GUI with password protection, lets you setup itself from within itself. Can install in it's own partition or within Windows FAT (AFAIK I think there's one for Linux too). I had trouble booting off ReiserFS with the last version but otherwise (read: Ext2) it's rather nifty.

Re:GAG

[larien]

Yeah, looks good, but doesn't support >8GB disks :(
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Re:have you tried grub?

[ttblum]

I'm also quite impressed with GNU GRUB, and yes that is the correct URL. They claim it's not yet an official release but it works great.

Re:XOSL - Another Recommendation

[CritterNYC]

I'd also recommend using XOSL [xosl.org]. (It stands for eXtended Operating System Loader) I've used it to boot Win95, Win98SE, WinNT4, Corel Linux, Red Hat Linux 6.2 and BeOS 5 without a hitch. According to their site, it is also known to support MSDOS, FreeDOS, Win2k, Solaris and VxWorks 5.x. And, XOSL is free (speech and beer) and released under the GPL. I definitely recommend it.