Thorin
11-28-2002, 10:22 PM
Lately, I've noticed that many posts with grub-related problems are appearing, and very few lilo-related questions are posted. I've been wondering, is there any noticeable advantage of grub over lilo, other than being prettier?
I've used grub on RH 7.2 and lilo on Debian 3.0 unstable/testing, and only had one problem with lilo and that was due to sheer stupidity (not running /sbin/lilo after editing lilo.conf). With grub, however, I've had problems with spacing in the conf file, missing lines that I have no idea what they are for. And all those grub problems required me to search google for some time before I finally found the solution, while the lilo problem was easily solved by re-reading the kernel compiling NHF.
Grub requires quite a few more things than lilo to boot a Linux or windoze partition. All that lilo requires is a kernel image and a System.map file (is the latter necessary? It's not specified anywhere in /etc/lilo.conf). Grub needs a kernel image and an initrd file, which adds an extra step to kernel compilation.
To boot a windoze partition in lilo, all I would write to /etc/lilo.conf is
other=/dev/hda1
label=windoze
To boot a Linux partition:
image=/boot/bzImage
label=Linux2.4.19
read-only
To do the same things in grub, would require a few more lines of things I have no idea what they do (chainloader +1 or something like that, I can't remember right now).
I guess I'm just weird in finding no necessity for a pretty picture on a screen that I usually only look at for a one or two seconds every time I reboot. And lilo can probably have a picture on the background too, I just haven't tried doing that.
p.s. Hmm... I guess this turned into more of a rant than I meant it to be, sorry MDWatts, please move it to /dev/random if you think it doesn't belong here.
I've used grub on RH 7.2 and lilo on Debian 3.0 unstable/testing, and only had one problem with lilo and that was due to sheer stupidity (not running /sbin/lilo after editing lilo.conf). With grub, however, I've had problems with spacing in the conf file, missing lines that I have no idea what they are for. And all those grub problems required me to search google for some time before I finally found the solution, while the lilo problem was easily solved by re-reading the kernel compiling NHF.
Grub requires quite a few more things than lilo to boot a Linux or windoze partition. All that lilo requires is a kernel image and a System.map file (is the latter necessary? It's not specified anywhere in /etc/lilo.conf). Grub needs a kernel image and an initrd file, which adds an extra step to kernel compilation.
To boot a windoze partition in lilo, all I would write to /etc/lilo.conf is
other=/dev/hda1
label=windoze
To boot a Linux partition:
image=/boot/bzImage
label=Linux2.4.19
read-only
To do the same things in grub, would require a few more lines of things I have no idea what they do (chainloader +1 or something like that, I can't remember right now).
I guess I'm just weird in finding no necessity for a pretty picture on a screen that I usually only look at for a one or two seconds every time I reboot. And lilo can probably have a picture on the background too, I just haven't tried doing that.
p.s. Hmm... I guess this turned into more of a rant than I meant it to be, sorry MDWatts, please move it to /dev/random if you think it doesn't belong here.