This is part of The Pile, a partial archive of some open source mailing lists and newsgroups.
Date: Sat, 27 Jan 2001 12:50:52 -0800 To: svlug@svlug.org Subject: Re: [svlug] Lilo Problem From: Chris Waters <xtifr@nothingbutnet.net> On Sat, Jan 27, 2001 at 07:26:18AM -0800, Rick Moen wrote: > begin Karl F. Larsen quotation: > > In general, it looks like GNU is late with it's new loader,... > Well, yeah. While acknowledging what it says on the web site there, the plain fact is that a whole lot of people are using grub quite happily. In fact, it's my understanding that it is the preferred (possibly even the only) boot loader on some platforms. Grub packages are available for Debian's stable and unstable system, and are well tested and well liked. The people who have tried it seem to almost uniformly swear by it. The GNU project tends to be a bit more cathedral-like than many people would like, and often isn't willing to call something done until it's perfect. > > lilo is dead for future use,... > Well, no. Not at present, no, but in the long run, it will _probably_ be phased out. But development on lilo is certainly not dead yet. === Date: Mon, 29 Jan 2001 15:28:43 -0700 (MST) From: "Karl F. Larsen" <k5di@zianet.com> To: Chris Waters <xtifr@nothingbutnet.net> Subject: Re: [svlug] Lilo Problem Chris, I am now a happy Grub user and know a lot more about lilo and boot loaders than I did last week. Grub comes with a well written info that explains how Grub works and demonstrates the setup. From that I can see why lilo doesn't work with large hard drives. Not a fault but rather a limitation of the lilo design. Grub is being written to avoid all hard drive size problems and it handles all kinds of hard drives the same way. Tell Grub the logical drive number, the partition number, and what to do, and it does it. For example, for linux you must tell it which drive, partition, and the complete address of the kernel to start, for example /boot/vmlinuz. It seems to work real well with my Red Hat Linux and Win98. === Date: Mon, 29 Jan 2001 21:14:59 -0800 From: Todd Lyons <todd@mrball.net> To: "Karl F. Larsen" <k5di@zianet.com> Subject: Re: [svlug] Lilo Problem "Karl F. Larsen" wrote: > that explains how Grub works and demonstrates the setup. From that I can > see why lilo doesn't work with large hard drives. Not a fault but rather a > limitation of the lilo design. Lilo works with large hard drives that I've worked with (1.6 GB, 4 GB, 6 GB, 10 GB, 35 GB, and sizes inbetween). I don't understand what's different about your situation. If you're installing RH 6.2 or lower, you have to download the newest lilo rpm and install it. RH 7.0 comes with a version that works just fine for all sizes. Don't recall the version numbers for Mandrake, but it gives you the choice of lilo or grub. > Grub is being written to avoid all hard drive size problems and it > handles all kinds of hard drives the same way. Tell Grub the logical drive > number, the partition number, and what to do, and it does it. For example, > for linux you must tell it which drive, partition, and the complete > address of the kernel to start, for example /boot/vmlinuz. It seems to > work real well with my Red Hat Linux and Win98. I really like the way grub is powerful enough that I consider it the vi of boot loaders. It took about 15 minutes to figure out how to do what I wanted (boot to run level 1) having never seen it before, but there's enough information available from the boot screens to figure it out. I like being forced to specify the root partition. Especially interesting (and completely logical) is if you have a seperate /boot partition, then the complete address of the kernel to start is /vmlinuz. ===