Baslinux mailing list

[James Miller <jamtat AT mailsnare.net>]

On Mon, 12 Jul 2004, Denton He wrote:

> I've decided to stick with BL1 for the time being with my 4MB RAM and 40 MB
> Harddisk, I'm going to have:
>
> - 5MB DOS Partition
> - 13/14 Linux Partition
> - 12 MB Linux Swap

This seems like maybe an appropriate time to jump in and mention the Gujin
bootloader.  This is a tiny program that can be installed to the mbr.
The author says it "understands" the Linux kernel, and can locate a kernel
on any partition and boot the system using it.  It sounds very promising,
and like something that could supersede all other Linux bootloaders.  It
gives a graphical menu when you boot the system, allowing to choose which
partition/OS to boot.  That said, I have no experience installing it to
any system.  What I do have experience with though, is using one component
of the program - tiny.exe - in place of loadlin for booting a Linux kernel
from a DOS partition.  It's worked flawlessly for that, and is much
smaller than loadlin.  It works in much the same way - i.e., "tiny.exe
vmlinuz - root=/dev/hda2" (the "-" is required if you're not pointing it
to a ramdisk image).  Read more at http://gujin.sourceforge.net/

James

PS Seemed like an appropriate response to this post because by using it,
it seems the author might be able to skip the DOS partition and devote his
whole HD to BL1 and swap.  Again, this presumes that it all works as the
Gujin author claims - which I have no reason to doubt.  I just can't
confirm it from personal experience if installing and using the whole
Gujin bootloader.