Re: Is grub perfect? (was Re: Does LXDE really require lightdm?)
On Mon, 30 Jun 2014 12:24:41 +0200
berenger.morel@neutralite.org wrote:
> Otherwise, if you do not like grub, there are other boot loaders.
> LILO at least works fine, and seems to be ok for your requirements: a
> single easy text file as configuration.
> It's what I'm doing, excepted at work for 2 reasons: it does not
> seems to support the new crap named... how is it named? Secure boot?
> Something like that. The fun thing about that is that the grub
> installation did not allowed me to have a dual boot with the original
> windows, so I could be using LILO right now it would not change
> anything. The other reason is that I do prefer mainstream stuff on
> computers that I do not want to tinker. Never had any problem with
> LILO, but just in case...
Thanks for the great suggestion. I had originally ruled out LILO (which
I used back in the 20th century) because it can't deal with EFI boot,
as I remember. But (let's all take some time to laugh), my boot disk is
a 250 SSD with an MRB partition, so EFI (and secure boot) is a
non-issue.
So you know what? If I ever lose my boot and can't grub2-fix it in 20
minutes, I'll try LILO.
I liked Grub1 better than LILO because Grub understands ext[2|3|4], so
you don't need to do all the recursive thinking and the weird jails to
install Grub, and having a boot file change its sector doesn't remove
your bootability, really, LILO was pretty predictable once you really
understood it.
You know, I have a bunch of too-tiny disks hanging around, and my
intent was to take them out to the driveway and do my 24 oz hammer
drive-wipe on them. Instead, I think I'll take a page from your book,
and use those drives for nothing but / and /boot and maybe /usr, and
use a modern >1TB drive for the rest, and then I can use LILO.
>
> I guess that there are other boot loaders (able to work on ext* file
> systems, of course) too around, but I do not know them.
Most can't understand EFI boot, which removes them from contention for
a lot of jobs. The booter meant for booting floppies and CDs can be
hacked to boot your system, but as I remember when researching it, it
was ugly.
I don't know how big the current Grub source code is, but maybe I
should just grab it, remove all code bestowing "pretty", get rid of
grub.d and just have everything in grub.conf, and call it SimpleGrub. To
paraphrase Henry Ford, "SimpleGrub is available in any color scheme you
want, as long as you want white text on black background."
Thanks for the great suggestion. I'm going to use it just as soon as I
get a chance.
SteveT
Steve Litt * http://www.troubleshooters.com/
Troubleshooting Training * Human Performance
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