Call Guiness, because if this multi-boot rig isn't a world's record, then, brother, we give up! BY MPC STAFF



This rig doesn?t have Plexiglas portals or sport a fancy-pants paint job, but behind its plain-Jane exterior are no fewer than 37 operating systems! Make that 53 if you count the DOS window managers.

The rig?s audacious architect is 18-year-old Richard Robbins?an Eagle Scout, all-state jazz drummer, and tireless OS enthusiast who drove with parental units and PC all the way from Southern Utah to our offices in Brisbane, CA just so we could verify the authenticity of his creation. Is this guy nuts? No. But he does confess that he launched the Menagerie project specifically because an online computer expert said it couldn?t be done.

All the OSes are loaded onto six hard drives, and divvied across five separate boot menus with the help of a freely distributed bootloader called XOSL. The Menagerie features four 5400rpm Maxtors, one 7200rpm Maxtor, and one 7200rpm Western Digital. The rig?s Gigabite GA6VXE7+ motherboard, 1GHz P-III, Promise PCI IDE ATA/100 controller, and ATI Rage 128 graphics were surprisingly OS-friendly. A 350-watt PSU powers everything.

When challenging Richard to successfully load any OS our little hearts desired, we were amazed at the variety?and antiquity?of what he managed to boot. It was nice to see BeOS (sublime, efficient), OS/2 Warp IV (vexingly quaint), and a bunch of Linux distributions (rebellious and defiant), but we were most charmed by Windows 1.01, which was just a few pixels away from looking like a basic DOS screen

Main Menu:
Dos 6.22 w/Dosshell
Dos 7.0
DR-Dos
FreeDos
OS/2 warp IV
SkyOS

Windows Menu:
Windows 1.01
Windows 2.03
Windows 3.1
Windows 95
Windows 98 First Edition
Windows 98 SE (2 installations - Main, Lite)
Windows ME
Windows XP Pro
Windows 2000 Pro

Unix Menu:
AtheOS
Syllable OS
Aos (Bluebottle)/Oberon 2.3.6
BeOS 5 Personal Edition
BeOS 5 w/ Mac skin
BeOS 5.03 Developer Edition
QNX 6.1
QNX 6.2
FreeBSD
OpenBSD
NetBSD
Minix

LInux Menu:
Storm 2000
Immunix
Conectiva
Libranet
Vector
JBLinux
Slackware
Trustix
Red Hat 7.2
Mandrake 8.2
Debian

Dos Window Managers Menu:
Tandy Deskmate
Desktop 2
Dos94
Dosstart
Egress
Gaze
Glance
IconDOs
Iconshell
QBfos99
Iconshell 2.1
xgui 3
xgui 4
MAcShell
MilleniumOS
XTos

Review:
_http://www.maximumpc.com/features/feature_2002-09-24.html

Source: MaximumPC



Last edited by ecperez at Sep 28 2002, 12:15 PM

so impressive hey?
saw this in overclockers.com.au just before but didn't seen this huge list of OSes installed!

interesting.. are all those oses though? or are some guui changes?

That would be an amazing feat if everything was actually working. (Didn't know some of those real old versions would even support that hardware).

At one time I had 9 OS's on a system I was screwing around on, using a combo of Boot Magic and XP (then whistler) boot loader.
I had every piece of hardware working in every system but my big mistake was using ME as the primary.
(Should have used 98SE) :D
Dave