[ILUG] State of the Booting

[Niall Walsh]

Hi,

since doing a few updates to the BLG, I keep getting drawn into wanting 
to see replacements for a few other pages.   One in particular is 
http://www.linux.ie/articles/tutorials/dualboot.php

The question is how best to answer this issue now?   I know the Kanotix 
and debian-installer should both correctly identify and setup boot 
options for any other OS on the system, is this the same for 
Mandrake/Fedora/Gentoo/$YOUR_FAV_DISTRO, I presume so?   Would people 
say it usually works NOW (as oppossed to 3 years ago when you may have 
last done it) in your experience?

Should we have a few seperate pages now instead?

1.   Disk drives and Boot records (where to install a boot loader and 
how to ensure you have a rescue boot method)
2.   Adding another entry to your boot loader
3.   Re-installing your boot loader (after installing an intractable OS 
which insists in must claim the mbr and not setup any existing systems)

Note that I am targetting this as BLG material (or at least 
complimentary to it) rather then an article, so it's all about the 
easiest way to present the basic knowledge people need without confusing 
them hence I think breaking it down might be best?

Also what are people's thoughts on bootloaders to recommend/discuss.   
What do current installers use by default?

Anyone who has a clue about multi-booting with OSX could also chip in 
(and look at the existing content on booting up and partitioning etc), 
it would be nice to have this covered clearly also.   I wouldn't write 
it myself simply on the basis of yahooing for info, for presumably 
obvious reasons :-)

Finally, what are peoples personal recent (i.e. preferably on the latest 
releases from $YOUR_FAV_DISTRO) experiences with ntfs and Linux?   From 
qtaprted resizing them to using ntfsprogs with/without captive (to write 
and format).   I'm currently doing some experimenting myself and I'll 
let you all know how it pans out.

Thoughts, comments, ideas, links or volunteers to (re)write this or 
anything else :-)

Niall