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The Boot Loader Showdown
An anonymous reader 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.""
On my dual-boot laptop, the virus protection in Windows doesn't recognize Grub, so it will wipe the boot sector if it's the primary boot loader. But I realy like not having to do anything after installing a new kernel, so I want to use Grub.
The solution? Install Grub on the Linux partition, and use Lilo to load it. It is rather funny watching the boot messages go through Lilo to get to Grub.
Nothing serious. GRUB doesn't have to be reloaded each time you add or take away a kernel. It's only a 5 second procedure in LILO (or 2-3 minutes if you have to manually monkey with the lilo.conf file). Personally, I prefer LILO for working with kernels because I touch the lilo.conf file each time a kernel is compiled. It makes it easier for me to weed out possible boot-loading problems when I'm making changes to kernel code.
There's one key LILO feature missing from GRUB, as far as I know: lilo -R
This allows me to install a new kernel on a box I'm not in front of, and tell LILO to boot it by default for the next boot only. If the new kernel doesn't work, I only have to ask somebody near the machine to reboot it for me, and it'll come back up in my old, working kernel. With GRUB, I'd have to try to talk somebody through hooking up a monitor and picking the right kernel... when it's a headless colocated server located somewhere far away, that's not always an appealing idea.
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If there were two pieces of software which I would say actively ward off more people from installing Linux, it is the boot loader and X video driver config. Both of them can be installed without issue using any standard installer with a user accepting defaults, and the system can fail to boot properly which are very, very poorly documented to debug and repair, especially in a dual-boot scenario. Recently I did a Suse 10 install, and it installed a video driver which even prevented Sax from working. Also, although I installed it on a secondary partition on my primary boot drive, for some reason it decided to install the boot loader on some other drive. Both were a pain to fix, but I wouldnt know how a first-time Linux user would even know where to start.