Often I want to boot my computer up as a music player as quickly as possible and without needing to login. My startup scripts look for the mp3player variable and if it is on, Slackware boots up into mp3player mode. In this mode a command line music player (herrie) is started before the login process. Herrie has a really easy to use ncurses interface and works with playlists (and xmms style shortcuts for play control).

I use this setup in my laptop when I travel so I can play music in my car (I don't have a dedicated mp3player). I also use it on my desktop when I want some music on quickly, such as when I get home and want to work out or work around the house. It is also useful in party situations because I can tell someone to simply choose the MP3 boot option to access my music. Herrie can chroot itself in a directory so I don't have to worry about anyone trying to look at my file system. If they exit the program or somehow kill it they just get a login prompt.

In some setups I use this with (such as laptops) MP3 mode also makes my file systems read only so I can poweroff without shutting down. I also give myself the option to load other hard drives (by default I don't do this to save power), if applicable.

When I'm done with MP3 mode I simply give the three finger salute (which I changed to shut the system down instead of reboot) or I login (optionally telinit if needed).

Genius! Thanks for that.

I dunno about "genius", but that's definitely an intelligent (and effective, and creative) use of boot parameters, and exposing people to ideas like that is a good thing. Way to go shadowsnipes!

Thank y'all for the generous comments Perhaps as evilDagmar said it will get people thinking about all the custom ways they can startup Slackware using boot options.

Well, people are rather frequently trying to deploy specialized appliance-like setups and almost never seem to realize that these parameters are quite visible from inside the OS once it's booted up.

I set-up a dual boot with Slackware 12 and FreeBSD 6.3 today. I modified my lilo.conf. This worked for me.

I am a little new to this:

so forgive a possibly ignorant question: This means that BSD uses its own bootloader installed to hda3 rather than the MBR?

Andrew

I didn't install a boot loader when I installed FreeBSD on hda3. I use lilo on my Slackware partition to boot FreeBSD 6.3.

I've just followed the advice in this thread and succesfully set-up slack 11 and ubuntu gutsy 7.10 to dual-boot using lilo, both on separate IDE hardisks in my pc. thanks for the helpful advice.

My setup: Slackware's lilo in MBR, Debian's GRUB in its root partition, and Debian's entry in lilo.conf:

On my laptop, Ubuntu's GRUB in its root, lilo in MBR, with lilo.conf entry:

When I used to do multiboot with multiple distros, my setup was:
- One /boot partition common to all distros
- Grub on mbr hard drive
The only thing I had to care is use different names for each distro kernel in /boot
(custom kernels/System.map with extra version number etc)

It all goes to show "There Is More Than One Way To Do It". Think I got my method from Saikee's Booting Tips, on the Justlinux forums. It's simple, and makes it easy to change distros.