The problem with mbr...
Tha biggest problem with the mbr boot loader is its
invisibility. Lilo prints out a prompt at boot time, making it fairly
simple for one to know that it's running. All the times I've come
across mbr, I just had a cryptic prompt that came up instead of the
lilo prompt that I expected.
It's the invisibility, coupled with the fact that, AFAIK, no other
linux distro uses mbr, that makes it hard to find out about. However,
mbr seems to be useful to recover from a bad lilo install. (At least,
some seem to think this... I've never really had a truly bad lilo
install, so I can't comment.)
I think that the solution to this is to make mbr display a prompt with
its name at boot time. This would make people aware that it's on the
system, which could help them find the READMEs. (It's somewhat
suprising and disconcerting to find something running in the boot
sequence without announcing its presence.)
--
Tom Rothamel --------- http://onegeek.org/~tom/ ---------- Using GNU/Linux
"Students who successfully accomplish this task will be given
extra credit (and a complete psychiatric examination)."
- Andrew S. Tannenbaum, _Structured Computer Organization_
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