terryc said on Wed, 8 Oct 2025 11:12:13 +1100

>I thought lilo pre-dated grub?
>And for <reasons> grub replaced it.

Indeed lilo pre-dates grub. I used it all the time in the 20th Century
and very early 00's. Lilo was very difficult to configure correctly
because you had to configure it in a chroot environment and set all the
letters and numbers to match what they'll be without the chroot. This
is because lilo can't read files: It must be handed drive, partition
and sector, or something like that, and then it reads the first 512
bytes which read the intermediate as Hendrik said.

Grub 1 made things MUCH easier. But of course, enshitification is
inevitable, so they came out with the Grub2 monstrosity. What a mess!

Unfortunately, neither LILO nor Grub 1 can handle the UEFI menace, so
we're stuck with Grub2 or rEFInd, which when I investigated 12 years
ago was inscrutable. Maybe rEFInd has gotten better, and maybe it can
handle that dumb old Secure Boot without the craziness from 12 years
ago.

SteveT

Steve Litt

http://444domains.com