Someone who goes by the alias Saikee claims to have a multiboot system booting… 100 Operating systems, which include various flavours of DOS, Windows, Linux, BSD, and Solaris. In this thread he explains how to set up your machine, incuding GRUB, to boot 100 different flavours of various operating systems.
I believe everyone has dual booted once to test another OS/distro, but this is….
“everyone”?
I submit that the percentage of *personal* computer users who’ve had the interest to configure a dual-boot isn’t large, and those doing so in a work setting is likely smaller.
maybe “everyone who reads OSnews” would be a better statement, even if unvalidated…
I have trouble just keeping up with what’s on 5 or 6 partitions.
While perhaps pointlessly overkill for even the power user, the exaggeration of what can be done does a good job of pointing out what might be done in a simpler context. I mean, who could be scared of multi-booting just a few operating systems after reading this?
A fun read.
Someone needs to get a life!
just because you can is reason enough……
you can say whatever you want about it being a waste of time but from an academic point of view it is very impressive!
I’m surprised he has loads of linux versions but no sky os, beos and other more exotics operating systems. Never the less, it’s very impressive
It’s hard to get warez SkyOS version. BeOS won’t even boot with the latest hardware. I’m not talking about Zeta, it didn’t work either on my laptop, and lack of good USB & PCMCIA support discouraged me.
How about a disk image we can download and have such a system? Maybe a VMWare type of image? Would it work?
Very cool though if you like this kind of stuff. Might be a bit too geeky for some
“Might be a bit too geeky for some”
Sure, but will those people be reading OS News?
What he really needs is all of them running in virtual machines, so that he can switch between them instantly. And maybe a few dozen cpus…
Looking at his grub.conf he has about 4 Fedora core installs and a couple Knoppix installs. His list just keeps repeating with the same distros over and over again. Sure they might be different version but how about installing LFS or Gentoo? I mean if you are going to go all out you should do it all the way.
I agree. Maybe OSNews should hold a contest : most unique OS’s bootable on the same pc (without resorting to virtual machines). Could be fun.
Edit: s/individual/unique/
Edited 2006-02-17 16:59
I agree. Maybe OSNews should hold a contest : most unique OS’s bootable on the same pc (without resorting to virtual machines). Could be fun.
But you’d really have to define unique. I, for one, don’t consider Mandrake and Fedora/RedHat to be unique OSs. If I stretch my brain enough, I would consider Gentoo different from Fedora different from Debian different from Foresight etc etc etc…
Maybe the contest should have a defined list of OSs?
The rules should simply state: different distros using the same kernel don’t count
I have to say though, I haven’t even managed to get something to boot from my second harddisk because the BIOS won’t recognize it’s geometry any more (after screwballing with a lot of differing OSes and distros with each their own partitioning tools), so I’m sorta impressed.
Saikee did great with all the linux distros and grub, but he is missing a lot of stuff I had back 4 years ago on my multiboot box. No BeOS, OS/2, QNX, Minix, Oberon, SkyOS, AtheOS, Syllable, and hardly any Windows versions.
I had around 40 systems, of which only 10 were linux and they were all different distros instead of repeats of different versions.
I was originally on The screen savers before it became G4 and also in MaximumPC magazine.
Check it out:
http://www.g4tv.com/screensavers/features/39860/Richards_Multiboot_…
I stick to 15 partitions per drive due to an old linux limit. I usually have 9 bootable linux at once and keep an extra instance of my users Linux favorite to test changes: you may want to name that partition “Kenny” and just kill the whole partition if something goes wrong. Getting beyond 3 of the same thing seems excessive.