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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."
Haven't we all gotten past the whole LBA/CHS/Large hackery, and doesn't the boot loader on your Linux system "just work" these days? I can't remember the last time I even had to look at it. How about an article on something timely, like LVM, or 1394, or any of the VPN packages out there? What's next, an article on fdisk?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
I'm sitting here in Louisiana - in the path of the storm - and I'm perfectly happy to talk about boot loaders instead of caving to terrorism.
Coming from a Mac / { 68k, ppc } background, I can't understand why you people put up with BIOS.
A while back, someone set up a PXE booter on our network for our PCs - but some machines weren't able to boot from it - they would hang at the PXE menu of images to boot from.
Turns out that some of the machines had a few extra bytes taken from the precious 640k limit that PCs have been saddled with, and the PXE menu was just large enough to run out of memory.
On a 512MB computer.
BIOS a bloody joke, and you should all be ashamed.
What alternatives are there to BIOS on the x86 architecture? Are there any OpenFirmware based PCs?