What utility do practically all Linux users use, regardless of their job or expertise? A boot loader. In this article, see how a boot loader works, meet two popular loaders, LILO (LInux LOader) and GNU GRUB (GRand Unified Boot loader), and review the pros and cons of each.
Personally I use Lilo!
I don’t bother with Linux on my high-end PC. I don’t even know what OS X calls its bootloader.
Some prefer LiLo, some prefer GRUB…
Its always about choice and taste
Personaly i like LiLo – its easy to use, it boots Linux and Windows, contains those features that i need ( a simple menu, a splash and… thats it!)
If i’ll ever need more features, i’ll just install GRUB
hmm… never before heared about Grub2… Interesting features.
GRUB gives you more more than that
I used to be a big fan of LILO, but a few years ago, I made the move to GRUB and have never looked back.
I like most of the articles published on IBM’s site. This one is also very informative. Too bad I’m still a bit afraid of GRUB. For years I’ve been using Lilo and now it’s a bit hard to change. 🙂
GRUB used to be really bad, about 4-5 years ago. But now I’ve seen it working flawlessly for the past 2 years and I finally trust it.
It’s actually a lot more flexible and powerful than lilo… I think you’d like it. But it’s not something that there’s much purpose in changing to for almost everyone, few people really do much with their boot loader.
what about anaconda… don’t leave poor red-hat out 🙁
anaconda is an installer system; Fedora uses GRUB.
I use whatever the distro I’m using at the moment installed for me. I don’t see a huge enough difference to really get picky between the two. Does it load the OS? Can I edit the config file to add/remove OSes from the boot loader? If the answer to those two questions is “yes” then I don’t really care which one I wind up using.
I use Lilo and XOSL together, personally. Just in case something happens to my Lilo install, I can still boot Windows with no trouble, and restoring XOSL is a snap.
Still using Lilo on my main box, I plan to switch to grub in the future, Lilo just seems easier to use, maybe because I have been using it longer.
because forgetting to run ‘lilo /etc/lilo.conf’ after building a new kernel makes me cry
Personally I use GRUB because of its features.
Recently I tryed GRUB for Windows.
http://grub4dos.sourceforge.net/
This site has very good information. We can configure GRUB to install selected Linux distribution directly from network with out instllation media. ( Requires broadband ).
I could install Ubuntu, Fedora & Mandrake with no problems.
I good thing about this is you can use the same windows boot loader to bootup windows.
While both LILO and GRUB will boot your OS from a menu system, I’ve found the ability to alter the load options from the GRUB menu to be indespensible. Whether I’m changing kernel options or going to single user mode, it sure beats adding another menu item to what can quickly become a cluttered display. As an additional bonus, I don’t have to worry about borking up and putting a typo in my menu.lst with GRUB – when I boot the next time, I can always manually input my boot parameters and get back to my OS
LILO also permits you to provide options. Simply type the name of the item you want to boot followed by the options. If using in graphical mode, hit <tab> first.
On my Abit KT7 motherboard, lilo works with no hassle, but with grub you need to enable LBA in the bios.
On another computer (Supermicro dual PIII-700) booting from a SCSI drive, lilo had trouble detecting the boot partition from the SCSI disk whereas grub had no problem.
Personally, I’ve been using System Commander (yes, I know it costs money). Along with Partition Commander, it makes it pretty easy to create and work with a multi-OS system.
I bought a copy 4-5 years ago just so I could boot a copy of Solaris/x6 2.6 from a primary on the second SCSI drive.
It worked! 🙂
yeah, that’s what we all need
Grub *still* requires aditional work to put mbr on the second drive, where lilo does that automagicaly, as long as you specify /dev/md0 (or whatever mdX is your boot) as the root disk. I hope grub2 takes care of that.
Debian Sarge user here.
Only bad thing I have to say about GRUB is that in a Win/Lin dual boot situation, every time I update the kernel, GRUB conveniently loses the default “chainload Windows XP” option and I have to copy it from the backup version it leaves behind.
I’m not even sure that’s GRUB’s fault.
That’s a bug in the installscripts of the kernel package, then! You should check the debian bug tracking system (http://bugs.debian.org), and if it’s not mentioned there, add a bugreport.
Make sure you keep your custom entries out of the automagic section of menu.lst.
Yet another item going against linux. Who wants to screw around with bootloaders anyway? Can’t we just have one that works for crying out loud?
“Yet another item going against linux. Who wants to screw around with bootloaders anyway?”
How so? If you haven’t noticed, NT based Windows uses a bootloader. Haven’t you ever heard of NTLoader? Heck, you can even use it to boot Linux.
So I don’t see how using a bootloader hurts Linux in any way? I guess Windows is just as inferior then eh since it too uses one?
Windows and Linux, if you are running a single-OS machine, have NO trouble with whatever boot-loader you throw at them, usually.
Start Dual-booting and you need to “screw around” with them. THis is not a “Linux thing” or a “Windows thing”. It is a “How Computers switch on and look for something to run” thing.
Try deleting NTLDR (N.T. Loader) and see how far your Windows system gets (HINT: It will fail to boot)
The command line editor, the interactive shell, there is no down side to grub. Face your deepest fear, just let lilo slip away and you’ll never look back.
http://gnnix.org/resource/screen01.jpg
To Anonymous (IP: 81.68.121.—):
You don’t have to worry about the bootloader (unless you’re using a source based distro). It’s coming with the distro, and more often than not it’s Grub. I don’t care – I like lilo, I like grub. They’re both good. Choose whatever you want.
Don’t forget that you can get many bootloaders for windows as well, not just the lame primitive buggy virusinfested bullshit version coming built-in into windows.
dylansmrjones
kristian AT herkild DOT dk
I don’t have anything againt grub, but I have to admit I use lilo almost exclusively since my day one with linux, about six years ago. Not that I never tried grub, I did, but you know the old saying, if it’s not broken, don’t fix it. Lilo just was good enough for me, nothing more, nothing less. Regarding grub, I didn’t really had much trouble using it, when I happened to do so. Only once, about a year back, when I wanted to use it as bootloader on a multiboot system and it failed to boot into an xfs linux root and I just couldn’t talk it into it so I just switched it lilo. Other than that, I’m just sticking with lilo until it suits my needs.
GRUB is ahead of LILO in terms of features. In fact, LILO is not even safe. If you ever forgot to type “lilo /etc/lilo.conf” after compiling your kernel you’ll use GRUB.
If you remove your old working kernel before you’ve made sure your new one boots up ok you deserve a slap
Not typing “lilo” after a new kernel compile should *only* make you lose a little time while you wait for your old working kernel to boot up so you can go back and type “lilo” 😉
On the other hand, GRUB has absolutely ruined partition tables for me at least five of the times I’ve tried it (generally when I remove the partition that GRUB’s secondary components resided upon; i.e., when I remove one distro to try another). LILO hasn’t yet screwed up other partitions (though it has messed itself up).
Surprisingly, the graphical bootloader GAG has had no problems in my experience (and neither has the FreeBSD bootloader, but that’s pretty basic).
You install your kernels with ‘make install’ right?
I haven’t run ‘lilo’ in five or six years
GRUB has worked on every single system I’ve used it on, including several that were problematic or didn’t work at all with LILO.
From my perspective, LILO isn’t worth messing around with. GRUB is just more mature, reliable, and versatile.
Lilo recognised my partitions
1 of those was a reiser4 partition
GRUB required patching and i didn’t want to mess around with it.
Btw NTLDR reported a screwd up partition table, didn’t see the NTFS [1st] partition just becouse the 2nd partition was Resiser4… weird
*Btw NTLDR reported a screwd up partition table, didn’t see the NTFS [1st] partition just becouse the 2nd partition was Reiser4… weird
**fixed a typo
Bootman (MBR) + Lilo (Linux partition). Simple and works like a charm!
Yeah,
I use bootman for all my disks.
Its fast, straithforward (is this spelled correct?) and has never failed on me.
‘BE the difference that makes a difference’ – JEWEL
yeah i believe someone who quotes Jewel in their sig.
j/k. LUUUUSER! 
hehe
Just the other day I finished compiling Linux 2.6.13-rc7 and rebooted. Then I realized I’d forgotten to copy the new kernel into /boot.
With GRUB, no problem! I just entered the path of the kernel build directory and it booted just fine.
I’ve heard GRUB does PXE boots also but for that I prefer pxelinux, a modification of syslinux.
So much misinformation in these responses.
Use whatever you want. For the person that said that a certain bootloader messed up their partition table 5 times, maybe it was human error! Neither bootloader modifies the partition table!
I’m not saying GRUB does it on purpose — it’s probably a bug in GRUB; one that might even have been fixed since the last time I tried it (Fedora Core 1, I believe). I don’t think it was an “error” on my part, except for not working around a bug in GRUB.
The previous setup had been Windows XP Pro on the first IDE drive and Fedora Core 1 on the second. GRUB was the bootloader that allowed selection between the two. When I repartitioned/reformatted the second drive and rebooted, GRUB was broken (which I expected), but after restoring a the standard bootloader I discovered that the Windows would no longer boot. Checking the disk with tools from a bootable CD I found that the partition table for the first drive had been corrupted.
Now, that in and of itself doesn’t say anything. But this was only one of the computers in a lab of cloned machines. On the next machine, I installed an alternate bootloader (GAG) first, then repartioned/reformatted the second drive. Windows still booted and the partition table looked alright. This was the case on the other 10 machines, in fact.
Given that about half the time I’ve used GRUB in the past seven years I’ve run into some sort of major error, I’m going to continue to believe this, too, was GRUB’s fault.
I like Grub. It works very well on my system, and I’ve even tried modifying the splash screen it came up with (which turned out to be disappointing because you can only use 14 color XPM images- easy to make with the convert tool in the Imagemagick toolset, but far from guaranteed to look good… I had better success with grayscale.
From what I understand, Lilo currently supports more colorful bootsplash screens and someone even managed to create a breakout game
http://www.gamers.org/~quinet/lilo/breakout.html
Why? Dunno…
I still like Grub though.
The bootsplash “feature” in grub is actually more of a hack. Fullcolor images will be usable when they implement VESA support in grub2, but that might’ve already been done.
-bytecoder
Ok guys, take a deep breath and repeat after me “it’s only a boot loader.” Please end all religious and feature wars. This boot loader is not worth it. We can live in harmony and peace. No need to choose either one. At the end of the day, it loads your computer and you move on.
Shut up. People who make distributions do just “choose one” ok? They are the people who make Linux usable for all the newbies. The rest of us are free to argue about trivialities as much as we like, it won’t change the adoption rate of Linux one bit.
What I want is a boot loader that will allow the following OS’s to boot all from the same box:
Win2k
Win2K3 server
RH Linux
Solaris 10
BeOS
I was using System Commander until I formatted with NTFS and then it was unable to function.
And this is with a SCSI controller that needs a special driver (Mylex) on boot.
Maybe BootIt would be a good choice for you
http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/bootitng.html
Cheers!
I’ve gotta ask… How can that machine possibly be useful for anything but porting to every off OS there is? I mean, if you use all those OS’s in one day you’ll spend probably 20 minutes just watching boot screens.
I wanted to use the OS/2 Bootloader, but I misplaced my OS/2 CDs, I wanted to use the Be Bootloader, but R5 just didn’t cut it…in the end…I use Grub, cause Kubuntu put it there…and didn’t fuck it up.
“Fullcolor images will be usable when they implement VESA support in grub2”
Leave it to GNU to make something more complex than necessary. When is GRUB going to support XEmacs and also become a full MTA and, for good measure, a Scheme engine?
the nice thing about GRUB is that you can boot linuxkernels by hand. It comes with a little console/shell which lets you edit current boot options or enter other ones. For instance, with GRUB it is no problem to change the physical location of the disk (/dev/hda to /dev/hdc for instance). You can always boot as long as you change the disk desgination, etc.
You can create a GRUB bootfloppy which provides you only with that shell, and with that floppy you can always boot your system regardless of the state of your harddisk MBR as long as you know where your kernels are (e.g /boot/bzImage on partition 3 for example). yes, this requires some inside knowledge about your partition scheme.
The only minor drawback for 1st time users is the naming conventions of the devices. For instance, /dev/hda3 is hd(0,2) in GRUB.
If you don’t use any of these features i don’t think it will matter wether you use GRUB or LILO or ldlinux or whatever boot program exists today, apart from VGA graphics and other things.
i myself prefer Grub over lilo. think it looks more neat over lilo IMO
“Grub *still* requires aditional work to put mbr on the second drive, where lilo does that automagicaly, as long as you specify /dev/md0 (or whatever mdX is your boot) as the root disk. I hope grub2 takes care of that.”
^ i want an answer to this ^
thanks
I’ve been using GRUB for the past three years, and I must admit it is a truly a powerful tool. Even though Legacy has its shortcomings, such as not supporting international keymaps, it has saved me more than once from being unable to boot. Having a GRUB floppy lying around is a formidable asset.
I guess LILO is quite acceptable on a computer with a static configuration (i.e. no hard drives being moved around), as one doesn’t have to touch it as long as it works. But when one screws up the configuration (as I have, and probably many others), and finds oneself unable to boot, and doesn’t have any kind of rescue disk at hand, it can feel pretty frustrating ;-).
The article mentions that if you want to dual boot Windows and Linux you should install Windows first, as Windows will overwrite the MBR. One way to avoid this is to install LILO or GRUB on a partition and let Windows have the MBR. It is not very difficult to use the Windows NT/2K/XP boot menu to start alternative loaders, including starting LILO or GRUB.
I’m not sure whether Microsoft supplies info on how to do this, but it’s on the net. You just need to make a 512-byte file with the contents of the first sector of each alternative partition, copy this to the Windows root, and modify the menu in Windows boot.ini. You can make starting LILO or GRUB the default if you want to. You didn’t know this menu existed? It isn’t displayed when it contains only one entry, which is how it will be set up by Windows.
An article on how to do this when the alternative loader is the Minix boot monitor can be found at http://minix1.hampshire.edu/faq/NT.html — although this refers to Minix and Windows NT, exactly the same procedure applies to Linux and Windows 2K and XP.
Why do it this way? Well, do you trust Microsoft? At some point, while updating your Windows or performing other maintenance, Windows may see something it considers to be “wrong” and will “correct” it for you without asking. It’s the old living with an 800-lb
(1600 kg) gorilla problem — do it the gorilla’s way and you’ll be OK. Once you’ve gone past the Windows boot menu to the loader you really want to use you can do what you want.
BeOS’ boot manager
—
garapheane
I like Grub more because it can be controlled through Grub itself. So, if my hard drive geometry changes or something evil happens, I can edit the boot parameters directly form Grub.
Neither, I use Air-Boot
I prefer a system independant boot manager and free for non-commercial use.
Funny enough Air-Boot has been chosen to replace the IBM Bootmanager as default boot manager for eComStation.
I use BootX, all you bigoted x86 users :-p
It’s still the best bootmanager I’ve ever used. You can load any other OS and the second stage boot simply rocks, heavily inspired by OpenFirmware. It even includes a fortran-like language interpreter. LILO is fine but it can bite you if you forget to rerun it when you install a new kernel. The worst bootmanager I’ve ever seen is, of course, the proprietary Microseft piece of shit Windows XP boot manager.
That should read forth, not fortran
The implementation is called FICL.