The Gujin Boot-Loader Was Updated

For those wanting to do some technical exploring this weekend besides thinking about the Linux beer possibilities, version 2.8.5 of the Gujin GPL boot-loader was released a few days ago.

Not familiar with the Gujin boot-loader? Don't feel bad, it's not nearly as popular as GRUB, U-Boot, or others. Gujin though has been around for more than a decade of active development. This C-based PC boot-loader was originally designed to replace LILO and dynamically finds Linux kernel images and other bootable partitions and bootable disk images.

Gujin has a simple graphical user-interface with mouse-driven support and it can detect Windows, DOS, and BSD boot partitions too. Gujin supports chain-loading other boot-loaders too along with featuring the ability to load standard ELF files.

The new Gujin 2.8.5 release is the first of 2012 and it offers up a whole lot of bug-fixes. Among the fixes are for loading a kernel on highly-fragmented EXT2 partitions, various MBR problems, FAT probing, update to support PCI BIOS v3.0+, and various fixes for dealing with BIOS bugs. The release announcement can be found on the kernel mailing list.

For anyone wishing to give the Gujin boot-loader a try, there are 32/64-bit packages of this open-source boot-loader for Fedora and Ubuntu/Debian distributions. There's also more detailed information on Gujin at osdev.org. The project web-site for Gujin is on SourceForge.net.