Re: How does LILO work...
For starters, you should probably set up your mail software to wrap
lines at 72 characters.
"Price, Erik" <eprice@ptc.com> writes:
<snip>
> 1) If I choose Linux from the current, SuSE-installed LILO, will that
> actually boot up my new Debian installation? Or does LILO somehow
> "remember" that it's looking for SuSE? (If it matters, the LILO
> screen shows the SuSE logo still, would be nice to replace that with
> the Debian whorl.)
>
The old SuSE setup will, AFAIK, boot your debian install iff the Debian
kernel image has the same name and is located in the same directory as
the SuSE image (not likely).
Debian creates a symlink to the current kernel version from the root
directory called vmlinuz. Every time a new kernel is installed (via
dpkg), this symlink is updated to point to the new kernel, rather than
having to modify lilo.conf to include the new path/filename.
I don't know how SuSE does it, but most other distros appear to point
lilo to a kernel image in /boot
> 2) If I use apt-get to install LILO, will that overwrite the old LILO
> or will something else happen... I'm afraid to do too much writing on
> /dev/sda because I don't want to damage my fragile Win2k setup, but
> I'd like to use LILO to boot into Linux rather than my Debian Boot
> Disk.
When lilo is installed via apt-get, the post-configuration script will
ask you whether you would like it to run lilo using the current
lilo.conf (found in /etc), assuming you configured debconf to display
messages at that importance level. This is probably different from the
one SuSE used and probably doesn't include your Windows partition. You
will have to add the windows partition to /etc/lilo.conf before
installing lilo via apt-get, or (re)run lilo by hand in order to include
the windows partition. It shouldn't be too hard to find example lilo
configuration files by searching google.
If you somehow get locked out of your linux partition, I've found it
useful to have a grub boot disk on hand. If you know the name of your
kernel image, a grub boot disk will allow you to search for it and boot
from it without having lilo configured.
These google searches should help you along:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=lilo.conf+example&btnG=Google+Search
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=grub+boot+disk&btnG=Google+Search
HTH
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