XOSL, an alternative to Lilo and Grub

WhyPanic writes "XOSL, the Extended Operating System Loader, is a free (as in beer and as in GPL), full featured, graphical boot loader that can work in conjunction with Lilo or separately to boot all varieties of Windows, Linux, and many other OS's." Nifty looking.

Comments

Some crossed wires here

[fobbman]

This isn't a new development, so did Slashdot and Freshmeat somehow swap queues? Should I be checking Freshmeat for Katz submissions?

Appears to need Lilo

[SiliconJesus]

According to the page...
XOSL is known to support

• BeOS
• MS-DOS
• FreeDOS
• Linux (with Lilo)
• Solaris
• VxWorks 5.x
• Windows 95/98/Me
• Windows NT/2000
• ...and others...

I read that as meaning it just boots up lilo, it still needs it to run Linux. Presumably, you'd install lilo on the partition, instead of the MBR.

Flamebait.... Windows can boot multiple OSes fine

[devphil]

If there's only a single OS listed in boot.ini, then no boot menu is given. (What would be the point?) The bootloader just boots it without prompting.

By default, Windows is the only one it lists. (No surprise there.) I copied my Linux bootsector to BOOTSECT.LNX, added another line to boot.ini, and then I had a choice at boot time: Windows 2000, or Linux. To do all this I followed the mini-HOWTO at linuxdoc.org; that HOWTO is now several years old, I believe. It was originally written for NT 4.something.

Your article is complete uninformed flamebait.