Free boot software for linux

ULTILEX 2.1.0 brings users a versatile Live CD Linux distribution which contains other Live Linux distributions, such as Slax, Finnix, Puppy or DSL. You can boot ULTILEX from CD/DVD, as well as from USB device.

When you boot, the first thing you see is a beautiful startup screen where you can choose which Live Linux distribution to run. The current version of ULTILEX is 2.1.0 and it "wraps" the following Live Linux distributions:

• Slax 6.0.9
• Finnix 92.1
• System Rescue CD 1.1.6
• Puppy Linux 4.1.2
• Damn Small Linux 4.1.10

To install on USB flash device, follow these steps (applied from Slax):

• Copy all files and folders from the CD to the root folder of your USB flash device.
• Execute "/boot/bootinst.sh" (for Linux), or " oot ootinst.bat" (for Windows).
• Thats all. You are ready to boot ULTILEX from your USB flash device!

Major Features:

1. One very interesting feature of ULTILEX is that you can easily install it on USB flash device and save the changes youve made during the live session on it.
2. You can modify files and even install/remove modules and all your changes are saved on the USB flash.
   

Enhancements:

• "System Rescue CD" is updated to version 1.1.6
• Some minor bugs are fixed.

Ubuntu Bootloader Manager is a graphical user interface (GUI) for configuring GRUBs menu.lst.

This app is still very alpha, use at your own risk and make sure to make a backup of our grub config file (/boot/grub/menu.lst).

grub-choose-default is a simple but handy GUI to set the grub default for the next boot.

Control Grub Default through a GUI

Do you have a dual boot system? Isnt it annoying when you want to reboot from Linux into Windows or vice-versa, and you have to wait for the machine to shut down, BIOS to initialize just so that you can now select the OS that you want to boot into?

grub-choose-default gives you a GUI that you can use to easily select the next default for grub and you can go and grab a snack while your computer reboots without having to wait for anything.

Its a very simple program that just reads your grub menu entries and then lets you click on the one you want to be the next default.

How It Works

In grubs menu.lst file you need to specify default saved, so that grub consults the file default in the grub directory to see which entry it should boot. That file is then modified by grub-choose-default

Cross Platform

grub-choose-default is written in Python (which is required to be installed at the moment) and works under Linux and Windows.

Under Linux it reads /boot/grub/menu.lst and writes your choice to /boot/grub/default

Then grub-choose-default searches all your drives for a grub/menu.lst or a boot/grub/menu.lst. There currently is no way to specify manually where menu.lst resides, please let me know if this is needed.

Gujin is a PC boot loader which can analyze your filesystems.
Because it understands the structure of Linux kernel images, Gujin does not need LILO nor GRUB and can even load very big kernels.
There is no need to execute anything after making a new kernel: just copy the kernel image file into the "/boot" directory.
Gujin is written almost entirely in C with GCC, and it fully executes in real mode to be as compatible as possible.
Enhancements:
- The 16-bit entry point of bzImage Linux files is now used by default (zImage is not supported).
- This is controlled by the "force bzImage protocol" tickbox or the "/p" parameter of tiny.exe.
- 64-bit ELF files can be loaded if the entry point is a 32-bit one (i.e. the runadr=0x200000 parameter is used for the gzipped ELF64 file).
- A longer timeout (up to 8 seconds) is used to read a CDROM sector so that ultra speed DVD-RAM drives can be booted.
- The name of the filesystem is used in the "root=LABEL=" Linux parameter.
- More bugfixes were made.

LinuxBIOS project is aimed at replacing the normal BIOS with a little bit of hardware initialization and a compressed Linux kernel that can be booted from a cold start.
The project was started as part of clustering research work in the Cluster Reseach Lab at the Advanced Computing Laboratory at Los Alamos National Laboratory. The primary motivation behind the project was the desire to have the operating system gain control of a cluster node from power on.
Other beneficial consequences of using LinuxBIOS include needing only two working motors to boot (cpu fan and power supply), fast boot times (current fastest is 3 seconds), and freedom from proprietary (buggy) BIOS code, to name a few.
These secondary benefits are numerous and have helped gain support from many vendors in both the high performance computing as well as embedded computing markets.
Note that, on newer systems, there need be no moving parts at all. At LANL, we are building a new no moving parts 16-node cluster to demonstrate this capability. The cluster will fit in a toolbox, run from a battery, boot in 10 seconds, and be controlled from your laptop (which, sadly, will still have a few moving parts).
Enhancements:
- This release adds preliminary support for M50FW040, M29W040B, M50FLW040A, M50FLW040B, M50FLW080A, M50FLW080B, M50FW080, M50FW016, M50LPW116, and M29W010B (all by ST) to flash ROM.

Loki Render software is a queue manager. It serves Blender render jobs or your own scripts to a pool of clients.

This is commonly called "distributed network rendering" or a "render farm". Loki can also boot clients via PXE, making for a quick and scalable pool.

slakbootIBS (Slackware Interactive Boot Scripts) is an enhanced set of replacement boot scripts for the Slackware Linux distribution.

Slackware Interactive Boot Scripts includes a set of control and dispatch tools for configuring and booting with colorized interactive scripts. The new boot process allows the operator to select or skip start-up components in realtime.

It facilitates debugging of startup problems and allows operators to maintain a common baseline to support several local configurations or multiple servers with a single set of scripts.

live-initramfs is a fork from Casper by Canonical. The project is used to build an initramfs suited to boot live systems.

live-initramfs is a hook for the initramfs-tools, used to generate a initramfs capable to boot live systems, such as those created by live-helper(7). This includes the Debian Live isos, netboot tarballs, and usb stick images.

At boot time it will look for a (read-only) media containing a "/live" directory where a root filesystems (often a compressed filesystem image like squashfs) is stored. If found, it will create a writable environ‐ ment, using unionfs, for Debian like systems to boot from.

To modify the code you can follow the below process:

Checkout or install live-initramfs

svn co svn://svn.debian.org/debian-live/dists/trunk/live-initramfs/

Then build to match your target platform (i.e. if target is lenny then build with lenny) with debuilder inside the live-initramfs (debuilder is part of devscripts package):

debuild -us -uc -b

Then copy the .deb generated to config/chroot_local-packages.