I use System Commander (v3) also and I think it's a really great piece of software. Haven't tried v4, which gives you the functionality of Partition Magic built in. It's much prettier than lilo. It brings up a nice colorful iconified menu and plays a cute sound and you can configure it to do a number of things like manage which partitions are visible to which OSes, provide additional boot time security, display a graphical timeout to OS selection bar, etc., etc. It can provide different system configuration files to different OSes or different configurations of the same OS on the same partition, so you could boot DOS on the first primary partition with one autoexec.bat file that includes "win" and another one that doesn't, and have a "DOS" and a "Windows 3.11" entry in the menu, for example. I'm trying to think of good features to mention off the top of my head, there are a lot. If you install A LOT of different OSes, System Commander will serve you better than lilo, as you can pretty much install and boot any OS on any partition hassle free and manage them. But for *just* win/linux/dos I guess you'll be fine with lilo and you can use the cash to buy more RAM. I've had hamm, RH 5.1, NT 4.0, NT 5.0, Win 98, Win 95, DOS, and DOS w/ win 3.11 all installed at the same time, but found that all I ever use is Win 95 and hamm, so I removed all of them except for Win 95, hamm, and DOS on a 16mb partition which I need for firmware updates and for System Commander itself. Win 95 is next to go to.... :)
I thought Red Hat 5.1 was nice, but you really need to get the CD if you want to install it right, as they make getting it via ftp a HUGE hassle. And you need to D/L like 50mb+ files just for the base system it seems, and it's a large number of files to, not just big tarball. And the package management sucks if you don't actually have ALL the RPMs on a mounted medium, because it will spit error after error at you unless you edit a file similar to Debian's Packages.gz by hand, which is a real pain. Red Hat's web site is more like a big advertisement to, Debian's is soooo much nicer. It lets you get to the meat right away, and there's more, better meat to. :) It does seem though that Red Hat is the first to get cool new software in RPMs, or the latest version. They've had Enlightenment and Gnome RPMs for some time now, and they also get to use xfsft instead of the xfstt we are stuck with, and appears will be for a good while. Evan Van Dyke wrote: > > From: Len Cumbow [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > > Sent: Tuesday, July 07, 1998 12:19 PM > > To: S K; debian-user@lists.debian.org > > Subject: Re: dual boot?? win98??? > > > > Look into System Commander. It's a boot manager with > > specific support for > > Linux > > as well as the various flavors of Windows, DOS, OS/2 and > > other Unixes. You > > can > > get it at any retail computer store for under $50. Works great. > > Why not use LILO which comes Free with Linux and works fine for > Linux/Windows/Dos booting? If you're using OS/2 or NT, they come with > bootloaders that can access Linux. WHy spend money for what you can > get free? > > --Evan > > -- > Unsubscribe? mail -s unsubscribe [EMAIL PROTECTED] < /dev/null -- Unsubscribe? mail -s unsubscribe [EMAIL PROTECTED] < /dev/null
