Re: don't upgrade grub or grub-pc ! what's wrong with LILO ?
On Mon, 1 Feb 2010 10:24:58 -0500 (EST), Brian Denheyer wrote:
> Imagine by surprise when I finished upgrading unstable and ended up
> with a system that wouldn't boot.
> And I'm not the only one, judging from the bug list.
> So notice to those running unstable, DON'T UPGRADE GRUB !
> So you're probably wondering what my question is :-)
> Is there any good reason for a system to use grub instead of lilo ?
> Grub appears to me to be a annoying, complicated, and hard to
> understand, and those are it's good points :-(
> I never had a problem with LILO, but for some reason Deb decided to
> make grub the default.
GRUB stands for GRand Unified Bootloader. As I understand it,
the idea was to create a single bootloader that could be used on
a number of different hardware platforms, rather than for each
hardware platform to have its own unique bootloader. There were
other design goals for grub too, but that was the main one.
But as chief engineer Montgomery Scott (better known as "Scotty")
says in the movie "Star Trek III: The Search for Spock",
"The more they over-tink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop
up the drain."
And it looks like the drain just got stopped up.
The goals of grub are laudable. But the boot process is a very
hardware specific thing, and trying to create a "one size fits all"
boot loader that works on all platforms is a daunting task.
Neither grub nor grub2 works on the s390 platform, for example.
It uses a program called zipl as its boot loader.
If lilo works for you, and you're happy with it,
then stick with it. That's my advice, for what it's worth.
Reply to: