GRUB and Lilo

[erosnemesis]

While i was installing RedHat linux 9.0 about 3 or 4 months ago i looked at the boot loader and i had a choice between lilo and grub. I picked grub because i already knew what it was but i have never seen lilo before. can someone find me a picture of it or tell me what the differences are. thankx

[Master of Reality]

alright.... sounds like an easy enough request... but i'm going to bed afterwards  

erm.. Lilo doesnt look as good. There is no background image, it looks quite basic. It cant handle partitions with OSes that are over i think its a gig past the beginning of the hard drive. They might have upgraded that by now though. Im not sure if you can edit the actual boot options from Lilo but i know you can do things like go to single user mode (for fixing the boot options in a very limited runlevel of linux)

And.. Grub can have a, somewhat limited, background image. Looks better. You can edit the actual boot options at the loadup a bit more (in case you fucked it up). I dont believe it has limits on the hard drive as to how close to the beginning of the drive the OS partition ahs to be.
So, really grub can do everything lilo can do and more.

I'm really not to sure why some of the other Linux(es) dont use it instead of lilo. I think Slackware, debian, EvilE, still use Lilo.

[erosnemesis]

thanks for tell me that is has really helped.

[mobrien_12]

The best discussion of Grub vs. LILO that I have read is in Chapter 2 of the Redhat Linux Reference Guide.

I know LILO the best.  It can support a boot image  and in many cases can boot higher than cylinder 1024 with options in the lilo.conf file (for the latest versions).  

However, the real kicker with GRUB is the ability for it to read ext2 (and ext3) partitions to read its config file.  Hence you don't have to keep reinstalling the boot loader when you change something... in fact, acc to the RH manual you only have to reinstall the boot loader if the location of /boot changes on the hard disk.