:: Re: [DNG] lilo development has ende…
Top Page
Delete this message
Reply to this message
Author: Edward Bartolo
Date:  
To: Brad Campbell
CC: dng
Subject: Re: [DNG] lilo development has ended
Brad Campbell wrote:
<<
I even migrated from Grub 0.9x to Grub2 and I've had nothing but
unicorns and rainbows there too. Again, another learning curve, but
nothing a couple of hours didn't sort out. I seem to be the only
person alive that actually gets along with Grub, but that's ok because
it works for *me* and that's what matters.
>>


I am another GRUB2 user who use it to implement a complex multiboot
system. When GRUB2 came about, I didn't like its requirement of using
scripts for configuration rather than simply requiring one to edit
grub.cfg. Irrespective of what its developers insist on users should
do, I edit grub.cfg manually to manage my system. The syntax is simple
for anyone used to code. My first step is to allow GRUB itself to
create grub.cfg, then I edit it to my requirements which are:
a) use the "/vmlinuz" and "/initrd.img" symbolic links to avoid having
to edit grub.cfg every time an update to a kernel in any installation
is done.
b) keep the menu order unchanged irrespective of how many times the
various installations are updated.

In my case, GRUB2 works even with such an uncommon maintenance scheme.
At first, I tried GRUB1 but it started to overwrite text when it
attempted to load kernels and initrd images. That is cosmetically
unacceptable on a decent machine. LILO is out of question. It is the
thing that I used when I first started using Linux ten years ago. Its
menu reminds me of Windows 3.1 welcome splash screen. Besides that, it
cannot recognize GPT formatted disks. Although this machine is BIOS
based, I opted to use GPT for its obvious advantages over deprecated
legacy MBR. Having the luxury of 128 primary partitions to choose from
and two partition records was something I couldn't justify losing for
whatever reason. MBR reminds me when I lost two or three installations
when I lost an extended partition. I run partition recovery software
to no avail although I succeeded to fully recover some installations.

--
If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.

Albert Einstein