[Techtalk] Lilo maintainer

[Malcolm Tredinnick]

On Thu, Jul 18, 2002 at 12:07:33AM -0700, kansas_kennedy at phreaker.net wrote:
> Why use lilo at al when you ave grub? Grub is more advanced, easy to use, 
> and way better than lilo. RHL is gradually trying to replace lilo with 
> grub...so it's good to start learning now.

That's probably a little too enthusiastic, so let me present the other
side of the coin. :)

One could just as easily ask "why change from lilo when there is no
reason to". A lot of people have systems in production where messing
around with the startup programs is just running an unnecessary risk
(even just in terms of the time required to do the upgrade). Grub has
its advantages, Lilo has others. 

I use grub on a lot of machines, but there are some cases where lilo is
still required. For example, it appears to be impossible in grub to do
the exact equivalent of lilo's -R flag: that is to boot a particular
image on the next boot and then back to the default after that. This is
a necessary option when you have monitorless, keyboardless servers and
are installing a new kernel. You boot the new kernel with the -R option,
leaving the old, known kernel as the default. If things go wrong, just
power cycling (which can even be done via a watchdog card) will bring
back the known good kernel.

Malcolm