Questions about grub and lilo...

[Drake1132]

OK, I have a new installation of Kubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn), and by default it installs grub as it's boot loader. I'm running a dual-boot system with WindowsXP and grub works fine, but from other distros I've used in the past I am used to lilo and I'm used to having a graphical boot menu in the boot loader (as opposed to the text-only boot loader I have now with grub). So I have a few questions about all this...

1. What are the key differences between grub and lilo?

2. Is one recommended more than the other, and why?

3. Are there any other boot loaders that I might want to look at and consider?

4. Is there a way to make grub use a graphical boot menu? How?

5. If I decide I want to switch to lilo, is it as simple as using Adept, Synaptic, or apt-get to install it, or would I have to do more configuration? Same question for any other boot loaders.

I think that's it for now, though I may have other questions concerning any answers I get regarding these 5.

Thanks,
Drake

[Snowhog]

Re: Questions about grub and lilo...

As to Grub vs LILO. The following is a bit dated, but still good information on the comparison of Grub and LILO.
Boot loader showdown: Getting to know LILO and GRUB

[Qqmike]

Re: Questions about grub and lilo...

Have a look at the GRUB and LILO pages here:

http://users.bigpond.net.au/hermanzone/

It’s my impression that GRUB is better (I’m forgetting exactly why just this moment– though GRUB is a general boot manager and is extremely flexible and I’ve taken for granted using it), GRUB is clearly more popular now, and I’ve somewhere seen a graphical front-end to GRUB (and a search would no doubt locate such – Search “graphical GRUB” or some such). And I’m biased as I’ve put so much time/effort into GRUB (eg, How To GRUB Methods - Toolkit
http://kubuntuforums.net/forums/inde...opic=3081671.0
). (Edit: Ah, there it is: See Reply #2, by Rog131 on graphical GRUB references.)

[Qqmike]

Re: Questions about grub and lilo...

That's a good reference Snowhog gave you.

The summary at the end says (as you know!):

"GRUB vs. LILO

As stated at the start of this article, all boot loaders work in a similar way to fulfill a common purpose. But LILO and GRUB do have a number of differences:

* LILO has no interactive command interface, whereas GRUB does.
* LILO does not support booting from a network, whereas GRUB does.
* LILO stores information regarding the location of the operating systems it can to load physically on the MBR. If you change your LILO config file, you have to rewrite the LILO stage one boot loader to the MBR. Compared with GRUB, this is a much more risky option since a misconfigured MBR could leave the system unbootable. With GRUB, if the configuration file is configured incorrectly, it will simply default to the GRUB command-line interface."


For me, oh boy -- the third point sounds like the show stopper for LILO, in favor of GRUB. This reminds me of stuff I've read about GRUB's advantages. Mainly, that GRUB Stage_2 (and I believe Stage_1.5) can understand file systems, so if you change things around, you do not need to use blocklist referencing -- GRUB can follow and find the OSes on their partitions.