On 2025-10-09 16:02:06, Steve Litt wrote:
> 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.

It's worth giving rEFInd another go. For me it just works, to the point
I wish I could use it for BIOS as well as UEFI. It finds anything that
is bootable, gives you a list. Only config options I changed are to
define the default thing to boot, and change the timeout.

syslinux is another option, though I really wish they would combine their
three different menu systems into one, or let Lua access the good menu
system.

--
A big old stinking pile of genius that no one wants
coz there are too many silver coated monkeys in the world.