Quoting Peter Olson (peabo@???):

> I apologize for top-posting, but I have no idea what you are talking about.
>
> For the record, I am not fond of GRUB2 either.

For my next-generation server rebuild, I'm going to be using the
extlinux bootloader, part of the Syslinux project. (extlinux is the
bootloader; Syslinux is the project/toolkit that includes it.)
http://shallowsky.com/linux/extlinux.html
http://www.syslinux.org/wiki/index.php?title=EXTLINUX

I've never been even a tiny bit thrilled about Erich Stefan Boleyn's
GRUB 0.9x that at this point is aka 'GRUB Legacy'. At some past
transition of Debian stable from one branch to another -- I see that it
was the one from 2.2 'potato' to 3.0 'sarge' -- my Works for Me[tm]
installation of lilo got auto-discarded and replaced by GRUB. I
couldn't help noticing that GRUB is horribly, grotesquely overengineered
for the task. I kept thinking, 'lilo wasn't broken. Why did they fix it?'[1]

In recent years, as I got progressively more irritated with byzantinely
overengineered distro-packaged software barging onto my Linux systems, I
actually checked to see about just, y'know, switching back to lilo. Two
problems:

1.  lilo's been orphaned for about half a year (since Dec. 2015).
2.  lilo can't support EFI/GPT, only old-school IBM/Microsoft disk
    formatting with an MBR as opposed to GPT, etc.

Jason Fleischli re-implemented lilo on EFI/UEFI as 'ELILO' in 2004, but
that was in turn orphaned in 2014. However, ELILO's claimed to remain
quite reliable. (As is, in all probability, lilo.)

My friend Rod Smith points out that EFI/UEFI-based machines don't actually
_need_ a bootloader to boot Linux, as the 'EFI stub loader' in the Linux
kernel suffices -- but that admins might wish to use a boot _manager_
like his rEFInd to control it:
http://www.rodsbooks.com/efi-bootloaders/index.html
http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/

Happily, my server system is _not_ EFI/UEFI, so I can just use extlinux
and get back to It Just Works; Don't Fool With It.[tm]

'GRUB Legacy' (GRUB 0.9x) can't do GPT any more than lilo does -- but
please note that extlinux can.

extlinux rules!


[1] See: 'Zen of LILO' on http://linuxmafia.com/kb/Kernel/