The Boot Loader Showdown

Francesca writes "What utility do practically all Linux users use, regardless of their job or expertise? A boot loader. In this article from IBM, see how a boot loader works, meet two popular loaders -- LILO (LInux LOader) and GNU GRUB (GRand Unified Boot loader) -- and review the pros and cons of each." From the article: "Most simply, a boot loader loads the operating system. When your machine loads its operating system, the BIOS reads the first 512 bytes of your bootable media (which is known as the master boot record, or MBR). You can store the boot record of only one operating system in a single MBR, so a problem becomes apparent when you require multiple operating systems. Hence the need for more flexible boot loaders."

Comments

Re:Could a micro-OS bootloader aid security?

[ZosX]

Yeah. I remember this too. For all the bad things they say about Macs, they still did some things that no PC ever could and this was one of the cooler ones. Another nice thing was that it was relatively easy to select boot drives, so you could just simply plug in an external drive and boot away. PCs took a long time to catch up in this regard. Usually when it was running right, MacOS would just work for the most part and never really threw many curveballs. Prefs could be drug out of their folder, applications could be installed just by copying them onto the drive, fonts were easily dropped into the font folder, everything was relatively simple to set up and run and they all used the same paradigms. Like using a system briefcase that you can open up and add things to the right folder. Don't know about the constant floating menubar, but I guess some people liked that. For what it's worth the start bar is a lot more obtrusive and a lot more useless in the windows world. I always set it to autohide and that really should have been the default from the start.