[aklug] Re: Friday night Linux (fwd)

<grumble>multiple e-mail addresses...</grumble>

         --Arthur Corliss
           Live Free or Die

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sun, 9 Jan 2011 18:11:41 -0900 (AKST)
From: Arthur Corliss <arthur@corlissfamily.org>
To: Tim Gibney <timgibney76@gmail.com>
Cc: aklug@aklug.org
Subject: Re: [aklug] Re: Friday night Linux

On Sun, 9 Jan 2011, Tim Gibney wrote:

> I prefer Lilo personally as well and do not care about the geewhiz features
> of grub. Grub can really mess up your MBR if you do not know what you are
> doing and it is way too complicated.
> What I find interesting is that Ubuntu tried Grub2 a release or two ago and
> downgraded back to 1.x. The upgrade to grub2 hosed my hard drive with Ubuntu
> and I wonder if this is why they downgraded back to Grub 1.x. Interesting
> though

When my distro made the transition to root in LVM I abandoned LILO in favor
of legacy grub because it made that trivial. I dispute your assertion that
grub is more complicated. It's not only not so, but it's safer than LILO
because you don't have to overwrite your MBR every time you update the boot
configuration. It also embeds an interactive interface to allow you edit or
compose entirely new boot modes, which is essential for testing new boot
configs with different kernel options. Again, without screwing with the
MBR.

In short, I have no regrets leaving LILO behind. LILO is simple and
reliable, and probably suffices for most people's purposes. But I fail to
see how legacy grub isn't technically superior to LILO by every metric.

Grub 2, of course, I have not played with. I was hoping it would eventually
go stable so I could manage *one* bootloader regardless of the platform.
Having to manage bootstrapping on non-Intel platforms separately is tedious.

         --Arthur Corliss
           Live Free or Die
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Received on Sun Jan 9 18:17:56 2011