Re: [MiNT] boot manager

[Paul Wratt <paul.wratt@gmail.com>]

On Sat, May 29, 2010 at 9:37 PM, Miro Kropacek <miro.kropacek@gmail.com> 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.
>
> --
> MiKRO / Mystic Bytes
> http://mikro.atari.org
>
There have been 2 efforts in this past 12 months addressing seperate issues.

If yours was designed to allow easy extension, suitable for a
ACP/FireBee, ie it had graphics+mouse (extensions), could boot on any
current OS (TOS included, even if it had to be compiled specifically),
then I think it is definitely needed

The big question is:
 "what are your ideas on functionality"
 "what did you want it to look like"

If you were to detail those here, and maybe others provided there wish
lists, you would see weather or not it was viable, and maybe how to
implement it in such a way that others could provide certain
functionality that was unsuitable for your purposes

Generally it was something I wanted to look into, particularly to
theme an OS (the new ACP/FireBee), and had therefore thought about
startup and shudown image integration also

Cheers

Paul
(good example Geroge)