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LILO Bootloader Development To End
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 ..."
fucked up partition table
Well it looks like Patrick will have to make a change.
Time to offend someone
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
.. of slackware people.
as a slackware user myself, i have no real problem with grub and i use it on a few machines where it's advantageous, but most of my systems still boot with lilo, and i don't see any need to change them around in the near future.
I was using LILO for quite a while recently, as my newest PC has a terrible UEFI system and the Debian installer couldn't configure GRUB by itself. It served me well in the interim.
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.
for the maintainers. The bootloader is a not particularly glamorous problem to work on, but it's critical to everyone and because it involves differing interpretations of standards by manufacturers and various OS developers it had to have been a headache.
Of course later projects had the luxury of a clean sheet, hindsight, and more hardware resources, but without a solid bootloader in the early says of Linux, history would have been very different.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I used it a very long time ago and countless people have used it before and since. It's far better to have a definite end date rather than just sporadic updates that grow farther apart and less significant, - leaving people to wonder if it's being maintained or not.
Instead of the maintainer feeling the occasional pang of guilt over not doing anything, they can feel good about what was accomplished during the life of the project and move on to the next thing.
I've used it recently in some distro I tried (maybe a Slackware derivative) and I was surprised it still worked well after all these years (it's an old machine, but anyway...).
I can only say thanks... to Werner, John and Joachim. These three guys have been in the forefront of the good battle and millions of people owe them at least a lot of respect.
I wonder whether there are any scenarios where LILO works and Grub won't...
LILO - Grub, Xfree86 - Xorg, SysV - Systemd, Fvwm - KDE & Xfce, OpenOffice.org - Libreoffice, lots of change for me all these years.
To all you which made the world lighter for others, next time you take a sip of your favorite beverage (wine, beer, tea, whatever), please make a toast to yourselves in my name. Please know there's someone somewhere on this Earth that is very grateful to you and thinks you're the best.
PS: All the other folks in software I didn't mention, you're in this one, too. (mc, Gimp, Konqueror, Kwin, Inkscape, Audacity, the kernel, GNU, etc. etc.)
Naw, back in the day lilo was the shit.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
Not really. Grub didn't try to replace su, login, getty, etc etc etc. It confined itself to being a bootloader. It didn't attempt to force changes on the kernel that would prevent LILO from working, so it was also a genuine choice.
Can't simply replace LILO with systemd?
Look into extlinux, it's what I switched to when grub totally went off the rails.