Version 0.84, Copyright (c) Tuomo Valkonen 1996-1998.

What is it?

Choose-OS, or briefly chos, is a boot loader for Linux/x86 - a program that is loaded by the bios before any operating system and allows you to choose the operating system to boot and enter parameters to it. It is IMHO a nicer replacement for the usual simplyish boot loader, LILO.

Features

Choose-OS is intended to be highly configurable and that is one reason why it will be highly modular. 0.8x series, yet, only implement operating system loaders as modules. Some day chos (version 0.9 or whatever the version will be...) will also implement user interfaces as well as operating system loaders as modules on both, the loader and installer side. It and can therefore be easily extended to support many different kinds of user interfaces (normal, vga, liloish, etc.) and operating systems.
It can currently load the linux kernel (vmlinuz) and bootsectors of other operating systems. Linux loader module features include bzImage, initrd and, of course, command line. Bootsector loader features MBR rewrite (useful for hiding dos from win95/98) and more.
Other useful features include what I call "single-shot autoboot", a feature that allows a program to tell chos what operating system to boot on the next boot. Rebooter is one such program.
If you don't always have the hard disk, on which chos data files are located on, plugged in you may find the "emergency boot sector" feature handy. When the feature is enabled and chos can't load its data, it can load a specified "emergency" boot sector.
For those of you who, for any reason, don't want to edit configuration files, there is a nice graphical configuration utility,Visual CHOS, by Andreas Blome.