On Mon, Jul 4, 2011 at 2:24 AM, Alex PADOLY <alex.pad...@gmx.fr> wrote: > Hi, > > For a server that works permanently with DEBIAN SQUEEZE, I used LILO in > kernel compilation and with and scsi isa card. > Why many of LINUX distribution choose GRUB? > I don't know that I must choose. > > Thank you. > Alex >
There are a big, big stack of reasons. Once grub is installed, you can edit grub.conf and don't have to "re-install" it in the boot loader, This is an *enormous* stability advantage: various changes of system configuration and kernel changes can re-arrange your drives, and having to figure out which one gets the boot loader with the new ordering is incredibly painful. LILO's old limitations to having your "/boot" partition contained entirely in the first 8 Gig of disk was also a big issue with dual-boot or larger drived systems where a single "/" partition was preferable. Grub does not have this issue. Also, LILO had a maximum character length in the label naming. (15 characters?) This prevented saying "kernel 2.4.37 with NFS tested", or "kernel 2.6.100 with USB3 testing" in the label names, and made life very hard for developers who were chewing through dozens of kernels in a very small amount of time. The *only* thing I miss from LILO is the "Set your default kernel from the command line" option, followed with the "Reboot once only with an alternative kernel". It saved my ass when a whole stack of new hardware had newer hard drives unsupported by a production kernel, and they all failed to reboot with the "upgrade" to the production kernel, rather than using the operating system's bog-standard kernel. (This was a Red Hat release, not Debian, but the issues applied.) That sort of thing was also why I loathe kernel, and Apache, and Perl maintainers who think "oh, let's just stick with the old version, we'll backport changes if and as we need them" and refuse to update to the version published with their OS. The integration issues bite you at bad, bad, bad moments. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/CAOCN9rwsKB8mS1nS0GvKAQJCJPT46ZbReb3=x9twlgeu55z...@mail.gmail.com