Hello,

Don't know if this helps, but here goes.
I think you gave up on GAG a little too soon, because it offers solutions for many of your problems

Quote Originally Posted by A. Jorge Garcia
Oh well, I don't see the benefit of using gag over lilo as both are installed to the mbr, right?
Not necessarily. GAG kan be installed onto floppy, not touching the mbr of any of your harddisks at all.
If you would do that, then win xp (or win nt, or whatever os is installed on that first harddisk partition) would automatically start as if there is no linux on the machine at all, as long as you don't use the GAG floppy at start up.

To boot into linux, you boot from floppy, choose the appropriate key, and off you go.
There's really nothing to it, not difficult to install at all. I must admit I skipped most of the docs, as all I could possibly mess up was a floppy, but it worked flawlessly the first time I tried.
After creating the floppy (see the readme with the downloaded file after unzipping for how to do that), just boot from that floppy, tell GAG in just a few steps where and what your os's are (read the "in program help" for how to configure, but there's really nothing to it, save changes to floppy (the same one), and off you go. You'll be all set in under 5 minutes.
Just repeat with another floppy to be on the safe side and have a reserve (although you can always make such a reserve later from within windows as well, if you keep the downloaded GAG files (another safety risk)
Now booting from that same floppy will offer you the choices you defined.

Yes, the big bad Klingons from the tech dept don't want me fiddling with the XP partition....
And as may be clear now, when using GAG from a floppy you won't touch the mbr of your windows partition at all.

Anyway, I used knoppix-installer and installed the knoppix (not debian) server as I couldn't print from debian (remember the whales?) with lilo in the mbr. Now I can use my printers but I don't get a login screen. Is there a way to get a login screen for the users I create on this server? If not, what about security? This knoppix server boots to a knoppix user that can mount/unmount drives, make them ro/rw, delete them.... This is not very secure, is it?
No it's not. If Linux will be accessed by different users you definitely need to setup different users, with rights according to capabilities/competence.
But setting up new users in knoppix without "root" rights isn't hard at all.
I'm sorry, I have no idea why you lost the logonscreen, and why there would be a connection with printer services.

Also, in lilo.conf, how do I change the boot order? On the server, I want to boot to linux, but on the user's PCs I need to boot to XP by default.
TIA,
When using GAG from floppy, you don't need to. And you can set the default delay in lilo to zero if you want. (just make sure you install lilo in the bootsector of the partition where you installed linux).
Windows will be started automatically when not using a floppy, as there is nothing in the mbr to point to anything else.
You can even prevent unauthorized use of a GAG floppy, you can give each os in the GAG menu a separate password.
Windows cannot read linux formatted partitions anyway, so your linux configuration is protected against tampering from within windows anyway.
The only remaining danger would be someone fiddling around with a tool like Partion Magic ("ban" such software, or password protect as well)

Last hint, read the readme file in the [src] directory of the downloaded GAG files (all you really need is the info on how to make the initial floppy), other readme's are a little garbled. Don't get upset by the language quality, the software is excellent

So, if you can overcome the feeling of "being thrown back to the computer dark ages" by having to use a floppy (it starts up in just a few seconds, and after making your choice from the menu leads you on in less then a second) then GAG can probably solve some of your questions.

kind regards,
Paul V