On Mon, Jan 31, 2005 at 10:57:30PM -0700, Paul E Condon wrote: > On Mon, Jan 31, 2005 at 09:01:26PM -0800, Karsten M. Self wrote: > > on Thu, Dec 23, 2004 at 01:13:31PM -0700, Paul E Condon (pecondon@mesanetworks.net) wrote: > > > Just my opinion: > > > Grub is much more featureful than lilo. It has a scripting language > > > that can be used during boot to get you out of any trouble that you > > > may have gotten into by reworking your kernel config. But to use it, > > > you have to remember how it works. To remember you have to have > > > learned it features. When I realized this I reverted to lilo. It does > > > the job for me. I truly believe grub is better, but I'm not ever going > > > to learn and _remember_ how to use it. > > > > The bonus of GRUB here is that not only can you get an interactive shell > > at boot, but there's a modicum of contextual support, at least insofar > > as tab-completion is supported. You can also type 'help' for a list of > > commands, and 'help <keyword>' for a short but usable description of > > commands. > > > > It's somewhat similar to DOS, in this regard really. Though lacking > > some of the file management utilties. And with the advantage of being able to read filesystems other than FAT16. My preferred method of booting used to be a weeny DOS partition with LOADLIN.EXE on it, until I discovered grub. > Yes, grub is good. But I'm 72 and have a bunch of things to do in the time > I have left here. Learning to use grub isn't one of them, and I don't think > a simple user should struggle with it if they already have a functional > command of lilo. Sure, but I think Karsten's point was that you don't actually need to do much learning. I use grub but I wouldn't say I've learnt it... since booting is such a rare occurrence, and problems with booting even rarer, any time I need to use grub's features to get a recalcitrant system booted I've pretty much forgotten anything I learned last time, so I work it out more or less from scratch. The features Karsten mentions make this very easy to do. As for installing/configuring it in the first place, that's just a matter of copying recipes from 'info grub'. > Recent progress in live CD versions of Debian make me wonder as to grub's > usefulness for error recovery. A live CD is vastly more powerful, IMHO. Agreed. Even the Debian installation CD is vastly more powerful... but I have quite a few machines with no CD-ROM drive :-) -- Pigeon Be kind to pigeons Get my GPG key here: http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x21C61F7F
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