[vox-tech] Lilo Bye Ta-ta

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Henry House (hajhouse at houseag.com):

> Yes. If you botch a kernel installation, grub will continue to work.

A lot of people never learned the Zen of LILO:

1. /sbin/lilo (the "map installer") is best thought of as a compiler,
and /etc/lilo.conf as its source code.

2. Therefore, if you change /etc/lilo.conf or any of the files it
points to, you must run /sbin/lilo before rebooting, to "recompile".

3. You should always have a "safeboot" stanza in /etc/lilo, pointing
to a known-good kernel image that you never fool with, as a
fallback. This ensures that if, e.g., you compile a new kernel but
accidentally omit console support, you can easily recover.

GRUB is a capable and flexible bootloader, but practically all of the
reasons commonly cited for it being preferable to LILO boil down to
"I once messed with my boot files before reading LILO documentation,
shot myself in the foot, and therefore blame LILO."


GRUB claims as an advantage that it can read (and thus lets you browse)
filesystems.  The corollary disadvantage is that it _must_ be able to
read that filesystem.  Minor filesystem damage might prevent boot (where
it would  not block lilo), and of a certainty you cannot boot GRUB from 
novel filesystems it doesn't know how to parse.  Want to run GRUB from
XFS or JFS?  You'll have to patch it.

> I also have found it handy to use grub to edit the kernel arguments at
> boot-time. (I know that one can input extra arguments to lilo, but
> AFAIK the lilo prompt provides no way to delete existing arguments
> configured in the bootloader's configuration file; grub does.)

Interesting point.  For that, I guess you want a generic stanza, devoid 
of the "Append" line in other stanzas.