Dualbooting your laptop or computer can be a chore, the a lot more switching among OSes you have to do â which is why virtualization or having individual pcs are the go-to for quite a few. Failing that, we have no alternative but to smooth about our dualbooting expertise with numerous workarounds and helpers. [William Somsky] shares just one such helper resource with us â an elegant system created with a RP2040-sporting TinyPICO board and a 3-way rocker change, directing GRUB to boot into either Home windows or Linux mechanically, or depart us with the typical boot menu. This way, you can just flip the switch, hit ârebootâ and stroll away, coming again to your Computer system booted into OS of your selection, as an alternative of timing your presence just so that you can catch the boot menu on time.
All you want to do is to solder a rocker change to your RP2040 board of decision, then flash the RP2040 with code that detects the condition of the change, and results in a mass storage system hosting a file environment a Grub variable to possibly a single of the , 1 or 2. [William] describes his journey, battling mysterious caching problems, but tells us he got it operating in the conclude. Sadly, [William] hasnât shared the RP2040-aspect code with us, but he has at least put the Grubâs custom made.cfg file in the âFilesâ area of the Hackaday.io undertaking.
Commonly obtainable microcontrollers with mass storage capabilities absolutely sure assist make these hacks straightforward â earlier, we have noticed dualboot switching like this accomplished by modifying assembly code of the MBR. Dualbooting is a hackerâs ceremony of passage, and specified OSes of late can make it more challenging than other types. Even if you donât want to dualboot your Computer, however, you sure can dualboot an Arduino!