On Sun, 8 Dec 1996, Markus Baeurle wrote:

> I'm clearly late in doing so, but I want to object to this as much as possible!
> I definitely don't want ART to copy broken things from the DOS world for
> questionable results and with clear drawbacks for everyone!
> You could put information like this in the CMOS RAM where it belongs which is
> in fact already done, see below.

I agree with this also.  If you want to push for a standard way of
allowing multiple operating systems to be booted, then persuade Acorn to
introduce something like the AutoBoot code currently available with
RiscBSD.  I would then hope that they would introduce an option of not
being able to interrupt the boot sequence without entering a password.

This should provide a more secure method of being able to boot multiple
operating systems, and would not affect other users who just want to run
RiscOS.  I think having some form of secure booting is necessary as a
number of people seem to be running solely RiscBSD on their machines and
using them in 'hostile' environments.

> It should be fairly easy to swap this so that RiscBSD is booted automatically
> and you have to press ALT to get into RiscOS. Look at it, I'm sure you can do
> this yourself.

This is already possible - my machine is currently setup this way - Alt
gets RiscOS, the default is RiscBSD.  Read the instructions in the 1.2
bootloader for more information.

Ben.

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Ben Strawson                                             B.Strawson@cs.ucl.ac.uk
Department of Computer Science
University College London               http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/students/zcacbrs
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