Re: grub/lilo - Re: Whats with this new Debian installer?
Alvin Oga wrote:
hi ya john
On Mon, 9 Aug 2004, John Summerfield wrote:
This is the major thing that annoys me. Which moron is it that
decided GRUB is better
i still like that comment :-)
lots of good and bad morons .. but all wants it to be "better" ...
grub _is_ better. How could you think otherwise?
Seriously, I can only think of one thing lilo does better.
what's the "one thing" ???
From the commandline, you can get lilo to boot a spefic menu item for
the next boot and then revert to the usual default. I don't have a
system with lilo to had, but I think it's
lilo -R <something>
see my dumb list of better or worst below ...
( i'd like a to see a complete lilo vs grub of the various
( good vs bad comparison of reasons put together
"its better" does NOT justify that it is "better"
and under what circumstance is it better
( it does make a difference )
better is relative to what the user wants or productivity or
the user level of how to cope with grub vs lilo
and the machine ability to boot or sit and wait or hang
- nothing we can do about the machine's ability to boot
or not boot due to bios or filesystem issues
c ya
alvin
== i use both ... depending on what the customer prefers
lilo
====
- does NOT care about the filesystem on the disk
- bad that it hangs on li or lil or 09090909090909
- bad that it doesn't support bootsplash ???
( or at least i don't recall being able to turn off boot messages
( vs putting up a fancy background image while booting in lilo
- is bootsplash important ???
( to some it is extremely important, you live/die by it )
I think bootsplash in grub started as a RH customisation: they might
have taken it from elsewhere, but when I first saw it it wasn't standard.
- it can reboot itself to into another OS with lilo -C xx.conf
( good for regression testing of various kernels or distro
( in that each time it boots, it boots a new kernel or distro
on /dev/hda or /dev/hdc
- grub failed this test ..even if i changed menu.lst
( i donno how to change stage1/stage2 yet )
I don't know what you mean. I do know that with grub or LILO in the MBR
you can boot either from a partition.
- grub did not like being installed into /dev/hdc
when the primary (current0 boot disk is /dev/hda
and told to boot /dev/hdc next time it boots
I installed grub into hdc just the other day.
- lilo was trivial 2 second change to make it do that
( boot=/dev/hda in lilo.hda.conf vs
( boot=/dev/hdc in lilo.hdc.conf )
grub
=====
- needs to know the filesystem on the disk ( a bad thing )
Arguable, but in practice it's not bothered me.
== a very very bad thing to require /usr/lib to boot ...
but it doesn't.
== but trivially fixable if /usr/lib/{stage1,stage2} is moved
== to /boot/grub instead
the grub install script does just that.
- has a nice command shell
- good .. you can do what you like if yoou knwow what to type
- bad ... if you do NOT knwo what to type, let me out of grub jail
Not a problem in LILO of courxe. There';s no command shell to get hot
and bothered over.
- who came up with "edit" "select" "edit/change" "boot" sequence
- has a wierd syntax of "command options" part of the "good of grub" ??
- i have other things to do than to [re]learn gazillion new
options which might be needed or not
root(hda0,0) -- huh...
-- ask the newbie the question ...
they'd say /dev/hda1
( machine assumes that means root=/dev/hda1 )
Of course, /dev/hda etc is quite alien to Mac users:
Mudlark:~ summer$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
/dev/disk0s10 54G 11G 41G 20% /
BSD users have something different from Linux too, but I don't have any
examples to hand.
OTOH Lilo doesn't have the capability.
- bad that to make a grub floppy, you need to copy stage1, stage2
which is sometimes in /usr/lib instead of /boot/grub
in which case, how is it supposed ot boot if it needs
to read /usr/lib first ( it'd require a temporary initrd )
There's a nice little script to do that too. And you can use it with any
computer, as I needed to a few weeks ago.
--
Cheers
John
-- spambait
1aaaaaaa@computerdatasafe.com.au Z1aaaaaaa@computerdatasafe.com.au
Tourist pics http://portgeographe.environmentaldisasters.cds.merseine.nu/
Reply to: