This guy managed to squeeze 55 OSes running on his Powerbook.
Many Systems on a PowerBook
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
This guy managed to squeeze 55 OSes running on his Powerbook.
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
I think the best part of the article is how he tried to justify it… If you’re going to do it, just do it and say you did it to prove you could, not because err… yes, Windows 1.1 comes in useful sometimes
IMHO he cheated.
he used virtual pc for all the non mac systems. what’s the challenge with that? with virtual pc each system can be installed in it’s own ‘container’ with no worries of over writing partitions.
on top of that he loaded openbsd on virtual pc. openbsd runs native on macs! he used red hat for linux when he could have used yellow dog linux natively.
the biggest challenge with loading multiple operating systems onto one machine is the boot manager. virtual pc takes the challenge away.
come back with 10 operating systems *not emulated* on a mac and I’ll be impressed.
I share the Same Madness, when I was at my peak in 2001 I had the Following OS in my PC.
Windows XP
Windows 98
Windows Me
Redhat Linux
Corel Linux
Mandrake Linux
Solaris x86 ( Had to play with fdisk)
SCO Unixware (Evaluation)
BeOS 5 PE (My Favourite)
FreeBSD
Debian Linux(Fastest)
Darwin
FreeDos
Windows 3.11on FreeDos
QNX
OS2 Warp( I was nearly successful in installing Boot disk 2 was corrupt)
BootMagic from makers of Partition magic was my favourite. It was my passion at one point of time where after my work all I did was install crash install again. Most of Times I would leave the installation on during night and complete it in the morning. And yes I was in a 10 hours a day 6 day a week job.
So what if he “cheated” !!!
I rather not have to deal with all these problems anyway.
You can also “cheat” on the real actual physical PC.
By getting 55 old Hard Drives and have only one partition
on each HD. Just shut off the PC and plug in
the HD to the IDE connection and turn the PC back on!!
Or use some hot-pluggable hard-drives.
If you want, you reduce the number of HDs if you
partition the HDs and put “compatible” or “partition-
friendly” OSes together on same HD. And put those
partition unfriendly OSes on separate drives…
At least this is the way I would probably do it…
as an OS addict, enthusiast, user, tinkerer and opinionanted person I envy him — now if only I had a powerbook to do that with
yawn I will take up the challege anytime soon as I get a MAC.
hello,
back a few months ago on the magazine “Maximum PC”
there was an article on the last page of someone
put 30 or 50 or so Operating systems on the PC.
Can someone tell me what the URL is ???
thanks,
with an Apple II, and apple IIgs and a mac 68k emulator he can also run DOS, ProDOS, GS/OS, alls of the MacOS’s, linux 68k as well as other things. He can up the tally of OSes by installing all 350 flavors of linux hehehehehe
Can somebody seriously pretend they have time to explore so many different operating systems ? Why not stick to one instance per OS family (server, desktop, embedded, open source, proprietary, …) and just forget about either the dinosaurs (DOS, anyone ?) or the toys ?
I think this guy may have too much time on his hands, but we all spend time doing things others think is wasted.
If this is his hobby, way to go.
There are a lot worse things to be doing.
My home PC:
Partition 1 – Windows XP for my use.
Partition 2 – First son (14 years old)
Partition 3 – Second son (12 years old)
Partition 4 – lots of shared junk… (was fat32, now NTFS r/o on Linux)
Partition 5 – Linux SWAP
Partition 6 – Linux (currently SuSE 9.0) That is a moving target … has been many Linuxes, currently a mono test-bed.
Boot Manager – Grub to select between Linux and Windows, and windows was installed first so it already has 3 options in the boot.ini to select the desired XP).
Q: Why XP for the kids ? A: Games, Kazaa(for mp3 sharing?), Word, and they use it at school.
Q: Why XP for me? A: Need for business use of Lotus Notes (I do support companies that use it, and there is no Linux version).
NOW a question to the Windows and Linux administrators:
You never heard of using more that one user defined on Windows XP (or NT) ?
Sorry, but if your kids use things like Kazaa and want the freedom to install their games and other software you will have a hell of a time rebuilding everything frequently…
Now, on Linux I hope this to be better, but, I have not yet tried my most difficult customers, my kids…
I am not specialized in Linux, but I can see some good things that came from Unix and I also can see that giving freedom for your kids to install whatever they like without having root access and destroying “my” system is not as easy as I would like.
What about a project to make a Linux distro/version that could handle such a multiple user/administrator environment withou having to install 3 times ?
Anyone else has this situation ?
Alex.
Now here’s a challenge — what file system would be accessible to the greatest proportion of these Operating Systems (taking Virtual PC out of the equation)? FAT?
…but I think he didn´t want?
I’m impressed. It is somewhat easier to deal with the OS since they are just files rather than partitions. I’m not familiar with mac partitions, but with sparc and x86, it can be a real pain. If you read the notes, u’ll find he had to do some tweaks on many of the OS to get them running under emulation. Minix or ELKS can be a pain for instance even on x86.
I noticed he put everything on an external firewire drive. I’ve considered that or USB drive for OS experimentation. Another alternative would be a Romtec Trios for x86, if ur wanting to go the real route vs. emulation. I will probably end up going with hot swap and see if that works ok, if not, then Trios external 3 drive array.
As far as fat32, yeah it’s sweet for exchange. I ended up using that for BeOS and my boot manager on win 98 vs win 2k3 on ntfs. My current setup: Beos 5 Max, Win 98, Vector Linux 4.0, Freebsd 5.0. Most i’ve had at once were about 8 OS on 2 ide drives.
Here’s the link to the old 37 OS on one machine: http://www.maximumpc.com/features/feature_2002-09-24.html
I guess 55 is certainly near, if not exceeding any current record. I’d be interested to see how many OS can be put on a single drive, no arrays, no virtualization.
I’d be interested to see how one attempts to attach 55 hard disks to a single standard PC. You’re lucky if you get 4 IDE drives on an average PC without resorting to USB/FIREWIRE/SCSI external drives or PCI cards. Baring in mind that IDE is restricted to two devices per stream, IDE is not going to help us much.. USB and Firewire is an unknown to me, but SCSI only allows 8 devices, so you’d need (assuming one CDRom, and 3 IDE Hard disks internally using 2 IDE streams) 7 SCSI channels, therefor 7 SCSI cards (assuming 8 devices on each channel) unless you got cards with multiple channels. Let’s not even consider power consumption…
These aren’t even operating systems! Windoze didn’t become an OS until NT and 95!
A multi-boot system 37 OSes in one box (53 if you count DOS windows managers) using some nasty partitioning, 6 hard drives….
http://www.langa.com/newsletters/2003/2003-03-31.htm
http://www.maximumpc.com/features/feature_2002-09-24.html
DInosaurs are invaluable depending on what fields you are working on. I work with peopple that STILL run win 3.0 and 3.11! some even have laptops with DOS only! (it amazes me – but I cant just say “sorry” – I have to troubleshoot them and help them be productive…it is a pain in butt though)
as for toys, this is a “in the eye of the beholder” kind of situation. one man’s toy is another man’s serious OS
He could easily add several more too via UAE (for classic Amiga OS); CP/M (via the CP/M emulator); the C64 (via Frodo or VICE); the C128, Plus4, & VIC-20 (via VICE); the old pre-PowerPC Mac (via vMac or Basilisk II). He could then build off of these, running some of the really exotic OSes like ACE-128…