I wrote different boot managers. Three boot managers are available as download. The Plop Boot Manager 5, PlopKexec and the new boot manager PBM6. The new boot manager is under development.
↫ Elmar Hanlhofer
I had never heard of the three Plop boot managers, written by Elmar Hanlhofer, but they seem like quite the capable tools. First, Plop Boot Manager 5 is the most complete version, but it’s also quite outdated by now, with its last release stemming from 2013. That being said, it’s incredibly feature-packed, but since it lacks UEFI support, its use case seems more focused on legacy systems. PBM6, meanwhile, is the modern version with UEFI support, but it’s not complete and is under development, with regular releases. Finally, PlopKexec is exactly what the name implies – a boot manager that uses the Linux kernel.
I’ve never encountered these before, but they seem quite interesting, and if it wasn’t for how much I do not like messing with bootloaders, I’d love to give these a go. Have any of you ever used it?
Yeah, plop is good when you are trying to boot that one ancient computer that just will not boot from a USB stick or from a modern ISO that’s burned to DVD. Usually then you can boot to plop on a CD or DVD and hand it off from plop to boot into your ISO on the USB stick. At least that’s how I recall it, I used it last about 2 summers ago to get my aunt’s 20-year-old mini-tower up and running. The 2013 version should be fine, you wouldn’t want a bunch of development and new features on something you are using to boot up ancient hardware, or at least that’s how it seems to me.
Plop also will work from a floppy disk, which is pretty cool to be working with floppies again. And with a floppy you even get more options.
I had completely forgotten about this program, but now that I saw the screenshots I clearly recall using v5 to resurrect either my old Duron 1.2GHz desktop PC with 256 GB RAM, or my old Pentium III laptop with 128 GB RAM.
I had read about Plop Linux on Distrowatch a while back but I never looked more into it. Browsing his site, I’ve concluded that Elmar is an absolute force of nature, and his many varied projects are an inspiration to a mediocre tinkerer like me! I’ll have to give the Plop bootloaders a spin on a few machines in my collection that refuse to boot certain older and obscure OSes properly.
I run Plop 5 on my Pentium machine. Allows me to dual boot DOS 6.22 and Windows 95 because it allows you to basically modify the partition table on the fly at boot, so while Win 95 and DOS both expect a single active primary partition they actually can’t see the one belonging to each other. Of course you have to be careful using partitioning tools once booted so you don’t unwittingly blaze the other away, but that’s not too hard to manage.
One of the coolest things is just that it looks and feels great, the starfield is a really suitable effect for an old machine like that!
UEFI, not EUFI.
The author is great. Many years ago he did everything he could to enable me to boot from USB on a system with a peculiar USB controller. He kept sending me versions to test and I was reporting results back. In the end it got much further, I needed to drop back pre-USB 2.0 to get it fully going, but he added a hotkey for that. Hold shift when picking the USB boot option if I remember correctly. He also offered me to ship him my system to get it fully fixed.
Many Pentium 3 and 4 systems can be USB booted only with Plop. I would not be surprised if it will solve various issues with newer systems too.
Plop was great — a real life-saver in the early USB boot era. I used it heavily in my startup around 2009-2010.
Got a machine that…
* Can’t boot from optical disk or USB?
* Or it can but you can’t get into the BIOS?
* Or the BIOS has a setting and it doesn’t work?
* Or the BIOS has a setting and it works, but only for that one particular USB device?
* Or it’s dynamic and if the one particular boot device it knows about is removed from the computer then next boot the BIOS removes the boot entry?
No problem!
Stick Plop on a floppy, boot the floppy, and a new boot menu appears. Choose your optical disk or USB device and Plop boots the PC off that and away you go.
It was a huge time-saver, and it worked so reliably, I used it on some machines _even when the BIOS *could* boot from that format, because Plop was quicker.