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Boot Linux, BSD, and OS X from Vista
An anonymous reader writes, "NeoSmart Technologies has just released EasyBCD 1.5, complete with support for Vista, Windows NT/2k/XP, and Windows 9x/ME. EasyBCD 1.5 adds experimental support for dual-booting any of these along with Linux, Mac OS X, or BSD — straight from the Windows Vista bootloader without any additional configuration needed!" From the article: "Windows Vista's new bootmanager is a double-edged sword. It's one of the most powerful booting scripts in existence, and a far cry from the very limiting boot.ini of legacy Windows operating systems. But it overwrites the MBR without a second thought, and doesn't provide any means for users of alternate operating systems and boot managers to use their old system. That's where EasyBCD 1.5 comes in!" EasyBCD 1.5 is free.
It's nothing new really. When I used to install Win98 as an afterthought alongside a Linux distro, I could be sure the lilo mbr would be trashed, and I made sure I had a boot floppy handy to boot back into linux and reinstall lilo.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
What would be cool is if Microsoft released software that allowed someone to simultaneously open multiple O/S's at the same time in a non-virtualized environment.
How is this possible without virtualization of some kind be it hardware or software? Oh wait its not...
...you can't "boot OS X" on non-Apple hardware without:
1. Breaking Apple's Mac OS X license agreement, which says that Mac OS X is to be run only on Apple-branded computers
2. Pirating Mac OS X (Intel), since Mac OS X (Intel) is not available as a standalone OS at present
3. Running a horribly hacked version of Mac OS X, with critical pieces of the system modified, including the kernel
4. Running Mac OS X in an unupdateable state, since any official Apple software updates that overwrite modified pieces of the hacked version of Mac OS X will break it
5. Running Mac OS X in a state completely unsupported by its vendor
6. Possibly violating civil or criminal law in your jurisdiction
I hope that most people can find at least *one* of the above items that would make them reconsider running Mac OS X (Intel) on a generic PC without paying for it (some will no doubt argue that they should be able to "reuse" PowerPC licenses for Mac OS X in spirit, but the fact is that it's not the same product - that's like saying that you at one time owned one software product from a company that's similar, so you should be able to use this other one/newer version/older version/different version for free). I'm sure others will come up with all sorts of justifications why it's okay.
But isn't all of the billions of dollars or R&D and hundreds of thousands of manhours invested in Mac OS X worth something? What if their pricing is predicated on what is essentially a good faith agreement that you'll not hack it and run it on non-Apple hardware? Does Apple have ANY say in how they'd prefer it to be used?
I could go on, of course, but just thought this was worth mentioning.
Nope, Apple isn't doing it, and neither is anyone else. And they won't, not like you are describing, and here's why: Someone needs to be in charge of the memory, the disks, and all the rest. That's the whole point of the OS. Therefore, only one OS can run on a computer at a time.
You could get around that with some fancy firmware to save the state to some storage device and load it up again, but it really isn't worth it. Virtualization does a better job for most of what you would want to do: Have a base OS, and run programs on top of it that pretend to be the hardware to other OS's. Done well, you don't loose much speed, and all the programs can run at once.
And if you want full speed, just dual-boot. It's a lot simpler than the setup you describe, and the only disadvantage is that you can't leave things 'suspended' in mid-run.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
Downloaded it just to check the license (yeah, I'm odd about this crap)
It's freeware. Sorta looks like a Creative Commons license, but basically it's just plain old freeware.
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Grub isn't very difficult to adjust to. I also held out on learning it for a while, but it actually is kinda nice. The thing I really like about it is after making a change (new kernel, boot option, etc) it isn't necessary to reinstall it to the mbr. Just edit menu.lst and it's done.
Take the 5 minutes to learn it.
"It ain't a war against drugs.it's a war against personal freedom" --Bill Hicks
Consider yourself lucky. When I installed Windows XP alongside Linux, it trashed my entire hard drive. That was the last time I ever installed Windows. The system simply can not be trusted. I use Linux and OS X exclusively now.
When you "make install" a new Linux kernel, it makes a symlink /boot/vmlinuz to the new kernel. So you won't even have to edit menu.lst if the boot option is this symlink. Grub also has the nice feature of editing the kernel entry at bootup, so you can go back to the old kernel if necessary.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Unisys sells 'em. It's called CMP and uses hardware partitioning to permit what is effectively a buttload of servers in a single box to function as multiple individual servers. This is a hardware trick and only functions because redundant hardware exists to facilitate the functionality.
Multiple OSes certainly cannot share any of the same hardware. OSes function with and expect full control over that hardware. The only solution is a hypervisor, effectively a mini host OS which is loaded as the kernel of the system and then proceeds to load guest OSes. Those OSes would be loaded into protected memory and the hypervisor would emulate the hardware interface to the point of supporting the functions of that OS. The hypervisor would have to be largely complete, including virtual memory and CPU abstraction, to permit both OSes to allocate their memory or schedule their threads arbitrarily. In order for hardware to function decently you'd need driver support both in the hypervisor OS and in the guest OSes, but it would still be significantly slower due to the resource management that would be required to permit both OSes to share the devices.
In effect you're looking for VMWare Infrastructure 3, an enterprise class piece of software which is an extensive hypervisor implementation. Only specific hardware is supported, with drivers offered from VMWare. It's intended specifically for server purposes and would function terribly for a desktop OS. In effect, you want something which cannot exist. Even as hardware catches up, the software to exploit that hardware also catches up. You'd need a high class machine to run OSes from over a decade ago.
Grub doesn't need an extra parition to boot from. I'm noting that you said the 1st stage BSD bootloader. That would imply that, just like Linux, there is a 2nd stage to the boot loading. The 1st stage of grub fits in the MBR without issue. The 2nd stage is read from your boot partition, which in most modern distros is the same as your root partition. It also happens that is a handy place to put the bootloader config in human-readable form. You might call that bloat, but I call it handy for stuff like single user mode or testing a new kernel without worrying about needing a boot floppy.
The "last selected OS" is handy, and GRUB can be configured to do this as well, but what if you last selected single user mode, or memtest86? If you reboot your machine remotely, and forget that the last option selected has no network support, you have no way to access the machine. At least with GRUB, you can edit the config and tell it not to do that.
Karma: Incomprehensible (Mostly affected by posting at +5, reading at -1, and metamoderating everything unfair.)
Although the blurb explicitly claims that this new bootloader is "more powerful" than NTLDR/boot.ini, in fact it sounds like this new loader is doing the same thing (starting grup/lilo/etc. from the windows boot loader) that people have been doing for ages with NTLDR. Here is an ancient HOWTO on how to do it.
"(Man) tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell." --Sartre
In case you're interested Port 25 just posted some information about using the Vista Boot Manager to boot Linux last week: http://port25.technet.com/archive/2006/10/13/Using -Vista_2700_s-Boot-Manager-to-Boot-Linux-and-Dual- Booting-with-BitLocker-Protection-with-TPM-Support .aspx
Tarball
As for the rest of your post, this entire subject is something completely outside the realm of things I'm willing to care about. I use XP for games on a desktop with resonably up-to-date hardware. Never had any problems with it whatsoever. I use Linux on a laptop for everything else. Never had any problems with it whatsoever.
So this is pretty much a moot issue with me.
" Boot Linux, BSD, and OS X from Vista"
That's not "from" Vista, it's despite Vista.
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make install -not war