best free boot manager?

[Cale_Hagan]

i am looking for a boot manager to dual boot windows and linux, off of two different drives, preferably supporting up to 5 or 6 OS's eventually....
also prefer a GUI if possible, if not, that's cool too. just prefer the best... for free. thanks in advance.
want to know what you guys think, from personal experience....

[OvRiDe]

Why not use something like Virtual Box or VMWare and run those OS virtually? Then you can use them simultaneously rather then having to reboot to switch between them.

[xr4man]

grub works pretty good

[AmEv]

"BURG".



It's based on GRUB, but it has a graphical interface.

Don't remember the download link, but Googling "BURG bootloader" will bring up install instructions.

I use it, and I have two minor complaints:
No 1080p support... yet
On of the better-looking themes are extremely sluggish.

Other than that, I highly recommended it.

[Cale_Hagan]

Why not use something like Virtual Box or VMWare and run those OS virtually? Then you can use them simultaneously rather then having to reboot to switch between them.

i want to learn linux a bit better, and what better way than to force myself to use it?
i was going to just install backtrack 5, but i figured i should learn linux a bit more in depth (i already know how to do a lot of hacking with bt5....)
so yeah. just for learning purposes.

[Konrad]

I'm still using an ancient version of LILO, from Slackware/Debian haha

GRUB comes highly recommended if you're using WinXP/Vista/Win7 etc ... although I don't actually have any personal experience with it.

[OvRiDe]

i want to learn linux a bit better, and what better way than to force myself to use it?
i was going to just install backtrack 5, but i figured i should learn linux a bit more in depth (i already know how to do a lot of hacking with bt5....)
so yeah. just for learning purposes.

Ahh.. no worries. The VM route will still let you learn all you want about using linux, it just doesn't require having to redo your computer everytime you want to load a different OS. Another easy option is WUBI. It will let you install Ubuntu without creating a new partition on your hard drive. It uses a folder inside of your existing windows partition to boot from. Its still boots fully into Linux, unlike a VM, but also give you the ability to just delete the installation from windows and start over if you mess something up. More information on it can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wubi_%28Ubuntu_installer%29

And a video of it in action:

LRQaL5-JMC4

The nice thing is its still a full dual boot system without the hassle. Once you get your feet wet, you can always go back and redo it a multi partition/multi boot system.
Hope this helps.

[Konrad]

OVR - does that linux-in-windows-folder approach force dependency on Windows file system?

[OvRiDe]

I am guessing it does. Since the installation is stored inside a folder in the Windows partition, I am assuming it does.

[AmEv]

I thought it created an EXT4 virtual HDD? Not sure, but do check out BURG.