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Author: Peter Olson
Date:  
To: dng, Rick Moen
Subject: Re: [DNG] Bootloaders (was: SystemD's brownie points over non-systemd OSs)
> On August 9, 2016 at 3:04 AM Rick Moen <rick@???> wrote:
>
> 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]


My principal complaint about GRUB is that it works very well until one day
when it doesn't, when it now provides the minimal help conceivable to boot
your machine. You had better have another computer handy to get help, because
GRUB won't help you.

My sad tale from several years ago involved a problem where a RAID 1 device
was enumerated differently, but more recently I have had problems with trying
to boot a supposedly exact restored copy of a system on a different disk.

Peter Olson