Hello, morgan73;

I bypassed the poorman's install, since even this poor boy had a spare hard drive or two lying around gathering dust, so I went straight to knoppix-installer mode...

I use G.A.G. Bootloader, and I can tell you that this little gem is the cat's meow! You just install the bootable image onto a diskette or a CD, then boot with that in a bootable drive after your Linux boot partitions have their Superblocks installed to install it at startup.

It is very straightforward; it gives you directions, a FAQ, and licensing info (GNU), then options to install or remove the app. The really nice thing is that although you do have to install it into your MBR at IDE0, removing it returns the boot sector to exactly the same config it originally had. Sweeeet!

I suggest you cut out a portion of your HDD and partition in two 4-8GB slots and one 512MB part. Partition Magic (NEWEST VERSION!!) will do this if you have the spare HDD space. Boot Knoppix and use either QTParted or Parted from terminal to set the EXT2 and linux-swap format for them, and install from that point. BTW, the knoppix-installer command also brings QTParted up first.

Then after Knoppix is installed, you merely reboot and direct GAG's attention to the partitions you want it to boot, name them and give each a little icon, then choose the boot interval, the default OS, and save the settings to HDD after the setup is finished. That is it. The option is also there to lock its settings with a password.

The poorman's install seems to cause more problems than it is worth, probably due to the persistent home being on the same partition with the rest of the OS. The feedback and negative postings here are the reasons I avoided it.

I have mine set to boot Knoppix 3.4, Kpx 3.6, Mandrake 10, Windows 98 and XP Pro (which is on an ICH5R RAID0 array, BTW) at the same time. Default fires up XP after 20 seconds.

This bootloader just brings up the Lilo boot options for that partition by default, so essentially anything is possible with this little guy....changing lilo.conf will alter what you see when choosing a partition; for instance, if, like me, you customize your kernels, you can alter the Lilo settings regarding which Default kernel to boot from, as well as the actual nomenclature of the individual OS....and all this is totally independent of the GAG.

You can even reinstall the OS on a partition, and the GAG will find it anyway, so long as everything else is unchanged and a valid boot sector (from any OS) remains!

In fact, I recently blowed up a kernel trying to get ALSA 1.0.6a working, so I reformatted its 10GB part to FAT32 and slapped a modified copy of Win98 in there, and neglected to change the GAG configuration. I found that booting Knoppix 3.4 then gave me a '98 splash screen and booted Windoze as usual...the work of 10 seconds fixed that! Now GAG properly shows that partition as a FAT32 Win98 OS.

It is far better than anything Lilo or Grub are capable of, IMHO.

Good luck,

FastVFR