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I have to agree with this. I've done quite a bit of work for the UK Government, and the Microsoft-centric homogeneous networks have to be seen to be believed.

But there is light at the end of the tunnel - I'm currently working as a Network Technician for a private school, and in order to save some cash I've been rolling out a number of FOSS solutions to common issues. We have a number of multi-boot sytems running XOSL, even more systems running StarOffice under the 'Site License for £23' deal Sun are doing at the moment, a webserver running Apache, and almost every workstation has the Win32 port of The GIMP installed for image editing work - a lot cheaper than installing Adobe Photoshop!

It's been met with great success, and if things continue to improve I might even see to switching a room into a BSD/Linux cluster.

FOSS is certainly a good thing, but never forget the cost in re-training individuals. The main reason we're still using Windows as our primary desktop OS is because when the kids leave and get jobs, nine times out of ten they'll be running Windows at work. If that changes, then perhaps educational establishments will look more kindly on BSD or GNU/Linux or what have you as a *real* desktop OS, rather than just a geeky toy.

-Blacklaw

This was featured on Tech TV's The Screen Savers a while back, and is also how I discovered XOSL (great graphical boot manager).

Then why doesn't the Windows XP installer recognise my FreeBSD and Linux partitions and allow me to select them from its boot manager, or allow me to resize or create any non-Windows file system?

Yah, seems xosl.org has a limit to the number of hits, and ofcourse we killed it ..hehe.
Anyways, you can check out some info on xosl at: xosl.sourceforge.net

I've also had numerous problems with bootloaders which were not good enough/aesthetic enough. In the end I'd stumbled upon XOSL a free bootloader which supports multiple OSes (more than 4), CD/Floppy boot (not flawless), additional boot customization and a very nice GUI. Try it

You might want to check out XOSL (Extended Operating System Loader). It pretty much rules over GRUB and LILO. It's GPLd, has a graphical interface that reminds one of Norton System Commander, yet the menu-driven options reveal features that System Commander didn't have.

Cedric Balthazar Rotherwood
Sun Certified Programmer for the Java Platform +

When you look at other partitioning schemes (such as the RDB system that the Amiga has used since the 80s) the whole MBR/fdisk thing is a complete joke. The anachronistic partitioning system on x86 PeeCees has caused me to waste significant time on something that should be trivial, and there's a whole sub-industry of bootloaders and utilities just to get around the arbitrary limitations that were built in by some visionless idiot in the early 80s.

Dumping it is a good move. And I note that this time (for a change) MS isn't replacing it with a proprietary decommoditized MS-only defacto standard de jour. This one is open and anyone can be compatable with it. What's not to like?

I wouln't dream of masking linux boot-up messages when I'm installing and configuring, but once it's up and running, would be nice to tart up the start-up.

With Windows 9x, no real point viewing an internal gubbins as doubt you could fix serious problems anyway without certification in registry hacking, or my usual method, being really quick at reinstalling.

Of course, there's www.xosl.org for a nice pretty boot manager, because - let's face it - lilo ain't attractive!

Personally, I love XOSL. It's a graphical bootloader with resolutions up to 1600x1200 - and can boot most file systems (it can't do reiser - Or it couldn't when I last tried it but has no problems on Ext2 etc...). You can put passwords on partitions, and I like that one can boot off floppy.

Yeah, mandrake had it for an option. I would have loved to use it but the bootmanager I use didn't recognise it.

I'd also recommend using XOSL. (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.

Try XOSL, 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.

Try XOSL. It rocks!

Corel Linux, at the moment at least, is a castrated version of Debian. For example, Corel (at least on my free copy) runs a special version of KDE. That's too big for this kind of thing. It has a really, really, really cruddy library setup, so trying to compile anything comes out with messages such as "missing libc" or whatever, even when I can see the files in the directories in the libpath.

Easy to install? You can't select singular packages, it installs LILO to the MBR whether you want it or not (I don't - I dualboot already, using XOSL and LILO in the root partition), and it's slow as hell. Oh, and only the paid-for version has WordPerfect 8 with it, and there's not much other software (not even a complete KDE) with it either.

Why has no-one suggested Mandrake? It's got the fastest RPM-based installation I've seen (and RPM has some nasty inherent timings after it's finished installing files), it allows singular package selection, it's got StarOffice (which is better), it's based on a version of Redhat and so has all the utilities you've come to know, and is supplied with Blackbox, my favourite WM. Small, takes up almost no memory whatsoever, and exquisitely stylish, especially in the blue mode. (SuSE supplies an outdated version - watch for this.) Also, it supplies network install, which is a plus, and can be installed very small.

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This message is not written by an employee of any Linux distribution firm, which is obvious as, at the moment, I am on a student footing.

Not to mention, of course, that it's a mouse-driven, GUI bootloader that is not only pretty, but GPL-ed.

I'm using XOSL, which not only looks very nice, but is rather customizable and now also includes/supports the Ranish Partition Manager. Alas, it's rather big, so it either needs a tiny partition for itself or has to be installed on a DOS partition.

Also, check out XOSL at http://www.xosl.org/.

Definitely. OS/2 comes with IBM's Boot Manager which allows you to select a variety of OSs to boot at startup; it also works perfectly with lots of other boot managers. (My personal favourite is the GPLd XOSL - it has a proper point'n'click GUI etc. and does not require a separate partition - see www.xosl.org.) But that's not the only way it can do this things. OS/2 supports two different file systems - FAT and it's own excellent HPFS (one of the best things going for it over Windows etc. when it was first released was support for long file names - not to mention multitasking, the still superb GUI etc.) If you already have DOS/Win3.x/Win9x already installed on a FAT partition, you can install Warp 4 over the top - it will carefully not overwrite the existing operating systems, and then, from within OS/2, you can just type boot /dos and it will - boot /os2 to come back. Finally, the cleverest bit: it has a feature nicknamed 'Trapdoor'. This means that the system can save its state to disk and boot the other OS on the partition, then when that shuts down resume exactly where you were. You can even create an icon that just boots Windows to run a single app - you never have to see the stupid Start menu etc. OS/2 Warp 4 is really an excellent operating system; I use it and the new Warp Server for e-business extensively, and despite anything anyone says they ARE well-supported. Fixpacks every few months - new drivers from IBM all the time (it now has DVD support, full USB support for all printers, mice etc.) HTH.