From owner-freebsd-stable Tue Apr 21 11:51:46 1998 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id LAA14824 for freebsd-stable-outgoing; Tue, 21 Apr 1998 11:51:46 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from netjava.com (Espresso.NetJava.net [204.253.66.2]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id SAA14618 for ; Tue, 21 Apr 1998 18:51:06 GMT (envelope-from jayb@netjava.com) Received: from ssuply.arn.net (ssuply.arn.net [204.177.232.173]) by netjava.com (NTMail 3.02.13) with ESMTP id ea369100 for ; Tue, 21 Apr 1998 14:07:00 -0500 Message-ID: <353CEC05.5F1C041@netjava.com> Date: Tue, 21 Apr 1998 13:57:09 -0500 From: Jay Bratcher X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.04 [en] (X11; I; Linux 2.0.32 i586) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Gary Kline , freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Free BSD and Windows References: <199804211822.LAA27407@athena.tera.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk Gary Kline wrote: > > I've been meaning to ask the entire group the following > questions(s) about OS bootloaders, since it seems that > FBSD lacks a very powerful one. How hard would it be > for someone who understands this problem to write a loader > that would be powerful and configurable? > > It probably requires an in-depth understanding of how PC's > work with DOS; how the BIOS talks to the disk(s). Writing > a loader that worked with any PC-Unix would be a major win. > > After 5 weeks of trying to dual-boot FBSD and Debian, I > gave up. Shouldn't be this hard, but is. > > gary kline Just out of curiosity, has anyone ported (or tried porting) lilo to FreeBSD? Lilo seems a bit more flexible than booteasy. Better yet, has anyone tried running lilo under the Linux emulation? All lilo does is parse a config file and write a MBR from a set of data files. The only problem that is immediately obvious is with device naming conventions. I haven't done much with the Linux emulation, so I'm not sure how it handles device names. On the other hand, I know lilo will boot FreeBSD, DOS, Win[95|NT], and OS/2. There are some special requirements for FreeBSD, but nothing which wouldn't be considered if you were going dual-boot anyway. Jay To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message