Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

LILO Bootloader Development To End

Posted by timothy on from the and-I-tell-you-things-were-better-then dept.

An anonymous reader writes: For any longtime Linux users, you probably remember the LILO bootloader from Linux distributions of many years ago. This bootloader has been in development since the 90's but development is finally ending. A homepage message reads, "I plan to finish development of LILO at 12/2015 because of some limitations (e.g. with BTFS, GPT, RAID). If someone want to develop this nice software further, please let me know ..."

5 of 135 comments (clear)

  1. Well now Patrick will have to make a change by Bob+the+Super+Hamste · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Well it looks like Patrick will have to make a change.

    --
    Time to offend someone
    1. Re: Well now Patrick will have to make a change by resfilter · · Score: 4, Insightful

      it's perfectly ok for a really mature peice of software to stay in a distrubution, even in a relatively unmaintained state.

      you don't have to 'change' something just because new features aren't being added anymore, until the lack of a new feature prevents it from being installed on more than a few edge cases, or a substantial bug is found that makes its use unsafe.

      i doubt either of these will be the case with lilo for many years.

  2. Nice work developers! by nycsubway · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Thanks for maintaining LILO all these years. I certainly do remember LILO loading on my first installations of Linux. I tried to install it on an IBM PS/2 and the biggest challenge was their micro channel architecture. I don't think I was successful at all, but I learned quickly what the LIL... meant.

    --
    http://github.com/gbook/nidb
  3. Mostly troll posts by Psychotria · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The current comments are mostly trolls and brain-dead idiocy. As typical for the new /.

    It wasn't until around 1999-2000 (I think) that distros started replacing LILO with GRUB as the default bootloader. GRUB offered many new powerful features that certainly helped its adoption. That is not to say, though, that LILO didn't have benefits as well (and in some circumstances it still does). It's sad to see that such a pinnacle piece of software contributing to Linux's success is going to be discontinued by the project's primary developer. LILO is such an important part of Linux history that it deserves a place is some kind of "hall of fame". But, it's open sourced so maybe -- just maybe -- someone will pick up the project so that it doesn't die. If not then it will be fondly remembered by those of us who were using Linux back in the olden days (1994 was my first install). Even if it's not continued the source code is informative, but the trolls will not understand that and just keep on using whatever their bootloader and praising whatever it is without understanding wtf it actually does and how the boot process actually works.

  4. Re:systemd by rubycodez · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Can't simply replace Poeterring with an indoor manure spreader?