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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
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.
Slackware team offered to help. They might fork it
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
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.
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.
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.
the fundamental nature of how our computers boot is always up for GRUBs.