Plop Boot Manager

Do you have a lot of different operating systems on your PC? Do you add and remove OSes as you discover new ones to try out and discard old ones that no longer make the grade? Or maybe you just have a couple of operating systems, and occasionally upgrade them?

Either way, you probably come face to face with the task of making new entries in your boot loader, or moving your primary boot loader from one OS to another and then retuning all the entries. That can be a tedious task, even dangerous at times depending on your setup.

This little article is a plug for using the Plop boot manager to eliminate the impact of OS changes on boot loading. Plop has a whole lot of other uses; it's a versatile product, and well worth examining to see if it solves other issues for you as well. For example, you can use Plop to boot an OS on a USB or CD device, even if your PC BIOS does not have support for this (because Plop has USB and CD support built-in). But I'm only going to mention the one feature that is most useful to me: the simplicity it brings to booting multiple OSes on one PC.

Now, you could just use Plop from a CD (or floppy) to boot your OSes. And that's a useful ability to have around as a failsafe - but perhaps not something you want to use as a regular method of booting. For one thing, it's a little slower. And for another, it means you would have to continually eject the Plop media from the drive and insert it back in later, whenever you want to use the drive for something else. Plus, it means you can't take full advantage of Plop's flexibility when it's working from a read-only media like a CD.

So it's simpler to install Plop to the first few sectors of your hard drive. Once you've done that, you briefly specify what OSes you have installed using the "PROFILES" option of the main menu. (Note that to add a new profile entry, just cursor down to an empty slot and press ENTER. Then you can enter the appropriate parameters.) As the operating systems on your PC change in the future, you just update the profile entries accordingly.

So what exactly are the advantages of using Plop over maintaining your list of bootable OSes in Grub or some other boat loader?

• First off, you don't have to know any particular boot loader's syntax or file structure. (I'm looking at you Grub2.) Let the OS you installed worry about how to boot itself. Why should you have to concern yourself with the mechanics of that? With Plop, you just point to the installed OS, and let that OS's boot loader do the rest when it is called upon.


• Secondly, changes to your suite of installed OSes has no impact. Suppose, for example, that you want to permanently remove the OS that - without Plop - is your master OS that has all the entries for booting each OS on your PC. Then you would have to redo your Grub work inside another of the installed OSes. Even if you are just installing a new OS on top of this master booting OS (say you are upgrading it), you still have to hope that it will have no impact; and you may still have to go through the process of making the correct boot entries, specifying kernel, location, options, etc. if Grub didn't recognize them all at install time. With Plop, you don't care. When installing/upgrading an OS, just install that OS's boot loader inside its own root partition, and leave the MBR alone. Then make an update in the Plop profile table to let Plop know about this OS.


• The first two advantages are in a way a natural fallout of the third: with Plop, the booting becomes meta. Booting an OS stays with the OS; it doesn't leak outside and create dependencies on other OSes. There is a nice, separate division of labour between specifying what OS to boot, and the actual booting process. And this is because Plop is not a boot loader: it's a boot manager. Plop doesn't take up a partition. It lives outside any OS and partition, and acts as a traffic cop pointing out the right way to go. When you think about it, isn't this a clean, logical way to organize a PC? Wouldn't it be nice if they came with a facility like this built in? We wouldn't even give it a second thought. And you won't too, now that you know about Plop.