Re: lilo or grub as the default boot loader on i386?

[Markus Schabel <markus.schabel@tgm.ac.at>]

Bruce Sass wrote:
> On Wed, 5 Feb 2003, Petter Reinholdtsen wrote:
>
> > At the moment we have two boot loaders for i386 available.  Both
> > lilo-installer and grub-installer are available.  One of them need to
> > be the default choice.  The default choice will probably be used by
> > most first time installers, and will also work as a recommondation
> > from the Debian installation team to our users.
> >
> > The previous versions of Debian used lilo, bug I am not sure why.  At
> > this time, grub is working quite well, and it includes a few features
> > making it my boot loader of choice.  But grub will fail with some
> > BIOSes and disk controllers.  I guess lilo will fail with others.
> >
> > Which boot loader should we make the default for i386?  I suggest
> > making grub the default.  The lilo boot loader should be included as
> > an option, until grub work on all the machines where lilo will work.
>
>
> I read the above and conclude lilo should be the default boot loader,
> "until grub work on all the machines where lilo will work".
>
> I have not heard of machines that lilo does not work on,
> are you guessing wrong or have I just not heard about them.

I have one - or at least one where I never got lilo running. no
distribution I've tested got it running (debian, SuSE, RedHat, Mandrake,
Caldera), it now finally runs with debian and grub. But that's the
only machine I've heard from, and I think it's just some old-junk-chip
in an ill-designed gericom-notebook what's wrong. All other systems
are no problem for lilo - at least after playing with linear/lba/... ;)

regards
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