Re: [tlug] Sorry to Hijack a thread but whats wrong with LILO

["Jonathan Q" <jq@example.com>]

On 2/25/2003, "Martin Baehr" <mbaehr@example.com> wrote:


>but it still can't run animations or even games, can it? ;-)

Off the top of my head, I don't know, but more to the point: anyone who
thinks having a boot loader run games or animations is a good thing, please
raise your hand now so we can have the bouncers escort you out.

>http://www.gamers.org/~quinet/lilo/index.html
>(site seems to be down atm.)

Yeah, they're probably using LILO and it got hosed ;-)

Also, a "me too" on what Matt said about GRUB and LILO, and a reply to
David's comment about recovering in LILO vs. recovering in GRUB: I can sort
of understand about the recovery thing, because the last time I had to
recover, I *was* running LILO.  Oh, wait.  That's another reason to be
using GRUB :-)  Seriously, though, I have never had to recover using GRUB,
and if I did, I wouldn't need to resort to a boot floppy a la LILO, because
GRUB has its own command shell that I described in my earlier post.

Another good reason is that adding another OS to GRUB doesn't require any
pain or even re-writing your boot sector (which is where LILO recovery
often comes into the picture). You just edit its menu file.

For example, let's say I have one OS bootable by GRUB:

default=0
timeout=20
title Woody 3.0r1
	root (hd0,0)
	kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.4.18-bf2.4 ro root=/dev/hda1 hdc=ide-scsi
	
The above (for those not conversant with grub) says to boot OS 0 (the first
one) by default, and boot after 20 seconds of waiting at the GRUB display
screen.  The root is the first disk in the system, and the line after that
is obvious.

Now, to add another OS, all I do is edit the file with my text editor of
choice:

title Hurd
     root   (hd1,0)
     kernel /boot/gnumach.gz root=hd0s1
     module /boot/serverboot.gz

This tells it to boot Hurd from the second disk.  After adding this to the
list, I don't have to do anything else; the next time I reboot, I will have
to OS choices in the GRUB menu.  Zero chance of borkage.  GRUB will happily
boot Linux, *BSD, Hurd, OS/2, any flavor of Windows, anything you care to
put on your machine, and all of them are as simple as making an entry like
the above in the menu file.

People can use whatever bootloader meets their needs - that's part of the
beauty and freedom of Free software - but I can say two things for certain
about GRUB:

- Except for David, I don't (AFAIK) know anyone who has tried GRUB and gone
back to LILO;

- As Matt noted, GRUB is definitely more advanced and flexible than LILO.


Manually installing GRUB requires a careful read of the info page and
learning a few things, but it's worth it b/c you'll never see boot sector
borkage again.  Using a distro that installs GRUB by default means not even
having to do that learning.  You just need to learn enough to edit the grub
menu file, and that's easier than lilo.conf.

Jonathan