Thanks to Knulle and Cuddles,

if lilo can be configured to *just do it* then bring it on...

I appreciate the fact that a mouse driven gui would be a bit hard, but i was thinking more along the lines of what you see in the bios cfg utils.. basically just cascading text menus.

now i know that similar sorts of menus can be crafted without any os present. take a look at the boot-manager by Nagy Daniel

http://www.masterbooter.com/

what i was thinking of was something like the above that is formed at runtime from one of those .sh scripts i was reading about. i'm guessing here but when you get to the "knoppix desktop=xfce" stage the kernel is loaded, right... course it would mean that someones gonna have to code a scriptable cascading menu system. cmon, how har could it be (he says with thumb pressed against forehead -- bags not me)

please believe me that i have no complaint against gnu / linux type os's like knoppix. what i'm really thinking is that these cd based live type distrbs need to make it really easy for ordinary people to use. ordinry people want to be able to save documents straight away without having to jump hoops.

Is there a knoppix derivative that automagically checks the read-write option on fat partitions?

anyways still looking for an answer to the ol "how do i view the .img file in windose?'

ka-kite