Limitations and advantages of LILO

Limitations and advantages of LILO

Posted Feb 16, 2008 17:24 UTC (Sat) by cortana (subscriber, #24596)
In reply to: Limitations and advantages of LILO by anton
Parent article: LILO and GRUB: Boot Loaders Made Simple (O'ReillyNet)

With LILO I learn before rebooting if I have a typo in the config file. Just fix it in lilo.conf and rerun lilo. With GRUB I have to reboot, then fix it in the boot menu, then fix it in menu.lst, then boot again to check that the fix is correct. Running lilo is a feature of LILO, not a limitation.

A nice new feature of grub 2 is the grub-emu command. Running it will let you see if your menu file is correct, among other things.

Installing GRUB can be a nightmare. I had a situation when grub-install would accept neither Linux-style device names nor GRUB(Hurd?)-style device names. Ok, the recommended approach is to then boot GRUB from a floppy disk, and use it to manually install GRUB on the hard disk, but I then decided that installing LILO is so much easier.

I think the recommended approach in this situation would be to file a bug and solve the problem. :)

---

(Log in to post comments)