Fwd: Re: New kernel

[Kurt Granroth]

On Wednesday 01 January 2003 03:10 pm, Bryce C wrote:
> A) lilo needs to be rerun everytime a config change is made as opposed
> to grub which reads the file of your hard drive at boot.
> B) I've found grub to be compatible on more hardware than lilo.
> Can someone disprove me on this?

On the other hand, lilo "just works" more often than grub in my experience.  
It didn't always (lord knows I have curses the 'LI' on boot over the 
years), but whenver I have grub problems, a little bit o' lilo always seems 
to fix things.

Case in point, I have gentoo installed on one of my machines and have had 
nothing but problems with the default grub installation.  When I search for 
help on the topics, though, I find next to nothing.  The grub "help" 
assumes that everything will work right off the bat.  Since lilo has been 
around so long, there is plenty of "how lilo screwed up and how I fixed it" 
stories.

I had two very specific problems on this one machine.  The first was that my 
boot partition was formatted with reiserfs (nothing I read said I couldn't) 
but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't get grub to recognize that 
partition at all.  Hence, no boot.  Also, couldn't find any messages on 
grub mailing lists or gentoo mailing lists about it except to say "it 
should work".

The second issue finally drove me back to lilo.  grub absolutely REFUSED to 
honor my 'rootnoverify' command that I gave for my Win98 entry.  I know it 
was getting the right boot partition and I know it was reading the menu.lst 
file (other changes went through).. but try as I may, I couldn't get it to 
acknowledge that there was a 'rootnoverify (hd0,0)' command there.  After 
weeks of having to do manual boots, I finally took two minutes to write a 
lilo.conf file and voila!  everything worked perfectly.

So yes, grub is cool in theory (and works great on my SuSE 8.1 box) and if 
it works for you, it's certainly handier than lilo for certain things... 
Buf if you want tried and true, lilo is still tops.
-- 
Kurt Granroth - "KDE -- Conquer Your Desktop"
KDE Developer/Evangelist | granroth@kde.org
http://www.granroth.org  | kurt@granroth.org