[NTLUG:Discuss] What's wrong with Pine (was Beginner!)

[David Neeley]

I am not aware of Windows overwriting the Master Boot Record simply because 
of a configuration change. In my experience, it does it *every time* when 
the OS is reloaded. However, since changing networking and such has nothing 
to do with the simplistic Windows boot process (as far as I am aware, 
anyway), it doesn't need to change the MBR when you change these things. So 
far as I am aware, these reconfigurations all are reflected in the 
brain-dead "Registry" rather than in the MBR.

I will soon be wiping out my Linux setup, reformatting, and installing SuSE 
7.3. Since I am moving from Reiser to EXT3, I can't simply upgrade. My plan 
is to use grub, since I was very impressed with its flexibility when I saw 
it on my friend's machine last week.

In addition, I am presently trying to decide whether to try Win4Lin, 
VMWare, or Wine for running the Windows applications I need to run. Since I 
just found out that FrameMaker 6 has been successfully run under Wine, I 
may give that a shot. The other complication for that will be that I can 
access and use the same fonts, which remains to be seen. If not, I'll see 
about running Windows itself on top of Linux for this purpose.

In case you don't know, "grub" stands for Grand Unified Bootloader, and is 
downloadable from the Web and is included on many different distributions 
in addition to Red Hat. Unfortunately, I have not yet begun to look at the 
documentation about it.

However, from what I have seen this appears to be the way to go, as it 
seems more flexible and yet simpler than System Commander, for instance.

David

At 02:19 PM 12/16/01 -0600, you wrote:

>Actually, Windows shouldn't overwrite the mbr without at least a little
>prodding, and I should have been clearer.  However, Windows will rewrite
>the mbr when you least expect it.  I can't remember specific examples, but
>I believe Windows will at least consider rewriting the MBR when you add or
>remove hardware, or change your networking setup.
>
>Apologies for the remarks about Windows, but it is handy, on rare
>occasions, to boot Windows on my Linux box.