A rant regarding LILO and various other related issues

[Guy Fraser]

Good points.

On Wed, 2005-13-04 at 22:00 -0500, John Morris wrote:
> On Wed, 2005-04-13 at 20:07, Chris Adams wrote:
> 
> > GRUB is not "broken" in a RAID1 environment (broken to me means it
> > doesn't work at all).  It doesn't do what you'd like, but that is
> > because it works differently.  All it takes to install GRUB on multiple
> > members of a software RAID1 /boot is (this is from a kickstart I have
> > around, although I haven't tried it in a while):
> 
> Broken in the sense that a non expert isn't likely to recover from
> common failure modes like installing or updating Windows and losing the
> MBR.  If you aren't doing RAID1 you have easy options, the best being to
> install Grub into the root partition instead of the MBR or at least
> being able to boot a rescue CD and just saying "grub-install /dev/hda". 
> With a RAID1 and Grub you had better be a wizard.
> 
> Yes there has been a lot of patching for FC4t1 to address these issues,
> but it would be hubris to think enough diverse systems have been tested
> at this stage of the game.  Booting is one of the only areas that have
> to deal with 16bit real mode BIOS biodiversity hell.
> 
> > No, it is the time for those that think there is a problem to test the
> > fix (that is the point of test releases and this mailing list).  If
> > nobody reports any problems with the test release, then the developers
> > will assume that the problem is fixed and move on.  If LILO users are
> > doing nothing but ranting and calling people names, they'll never know
> > if the fix works for them, so the developers won't find out if there are
> > still corner cases that need work.
> 
> Hey, I finally made peace with Grub to the point where I can use it. But
> I ain't a newbie and I don't particularly like that it is HARDER to use
> if you want to do anything unusual.  It is probably going to remain
> being a badly ported BSD/HURD solution with it's alien (to a linux user)
> drive naming conventions.  Yes Grub has a command line mode.  Big whoop,
> if something goes wrong I boot a rescue disc instead because that
> solution WILL work, and has worked often enough in the past I'm
> comfortable with it.
> 
> It makes perfect sense to make Grub the default boot loader because a)
> it has been for several years and does work for most users, b) it is
> destined to be the only one eventually and c) as the default it will be
> tested.  But if there are any scenarios where Grub still fails those
> users are going to be gone and I can't blame them if they don't come
> back.
> 
> > Fedora is not a "perpetual beta release".
> 
> You must be using a different Fedora than I do. It ain't Rawhide or Sid,
> but it certainly isn't what I'd call a production OS.  It is exactly
> what it is advertised as, a testbed.
> 

It shouldn't have to be a bloodbath either.

> -- 
> John M.      http://www.beau.org/~jmorris     This post is 100% M$Free!
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