Re: [MiNT] boot manager

[George Nakos <ggn@hol.gr>]

Hello Miro,

Saturday, May 29, 2010, 2:37:30 PM, you wrote:

> Hi,

> another "what if" question to the public. In your opinion, it is worth
> to have some kind of boot loader / manager on Atari platform? You
> know, currently this function supplies only HD Driver's "Boot
> parameters" and "Devices and partitions" menus, where you can define
> boot order (i.e. in what order disk/partitions should be checked, what
> is boot partition and what is preferred OS to look for) but that's it.
> You certainly know how Windows/Linux boot managers look like, on Atari
> we're forced to always start HD Driver and change boot order there,
> i.e. not possible to "dynamically" decide what partition / OS to boot.

> I ask because I can't decide if it's so annoying or not. Last days
> I've played with NetBSD, I plan do the same with Linux and in this
> case it would help. But for "normal" Atari usage (TOS, MiNT, MagiC) we
> can handle everything from C: as MiNT and MagiC needs GEMDOS
> bootstrapper in AUTO. I think even Linux does? Only NetBSD is then
> directly booted from MBR.

While  I have no interest for the moment to install Linux or NetBSD on
my Falcon, I'll give a theoretical answer :)

My  system  currently  has X-Boot on the auto folder, and I have ready
configs  for  just  about  anything I want to do (tos, mint, tos+nvdi,
tos+thing,  tos clean etc etc). So what I would set out to do would be
to  check out the boot code of linux and netbsd and try to make it run
from  the  auto folder, so it'd integrate perfectly with what I'm used
to.

My €0.02 :)


-- 
Best regards,
 George                            mailto:ggn@hol.gr