LILO vs. Grub

[al885]

What are the pros and cons of each?

[sharth]

grub can load some os's (such as hurd) that lilo can't.

[Icarus]

vi or emacs
Gnome or KDE
Mandrake or Red Hat
Chocolate or Vanilla

It's mostly a personal preferance. Lots of the 'old timers' will say LILO since that is what they learned and know, others will say GRUB that have taken the time to learn it and know it.
Besides...who's going to be using HURD anyway?
note: see sig ;)

[JohnT]

Try both and arrive at your own conclusions...there is a tool for every purpose........detemine yours.

[sharth]

Originally posted by mahdi
Besides...who's going to be using HURD anyway?
note: see sig ;) Hey! :p I'm probably going to eventually...

[ColeSlaw]

Careful trying both LILO and GRUB though... I believe it can cause some problems if they aren't both installed correctly. I guess I'm trying to say I heard they don't play nice together.

If you care though, I use GRUB and like it just fine. Never used LILO so can't say about that.

[adikgede]

Im a bad speller. command line completion did it for me in GRUB.

tangent :

What do people think of "e2label"

[bosox79]

Originally posted by JohnT
Try both and arrive at your own conclusions...there is a tool for every purpose........detemine yours.

I agree, both boot loaders have there strengths & weaknesses. I feel it is a matter of personal choice :)

[knute]

I've actually set up and used both.

Now, I'll put it to you straight what I thought about them.

For the normal person using windows and linux and dual booting, they do exactly the same thing, have the same features, and are for all intents and purposes equal. They both boot the OS without a problem, you can put pictures into both of them, you can configure both of them equally well, but differently.

If you have a tendancy to play with your system, and want a boot loader that you can configure w/o having to go into the os, I'ld choose grub, because it's more configurable without having to be in linux. Also, if you are booting something other than windows or linux, i'ld suggest grub, because it was designed with that in mind.

Lilo though, is easier to configure, as it's a straight text file in /etc that you edit just like any other config file and then run lilo again to apply the changes.

After you get things set up, they are both easy, but the formats are different.

HTH

[JohnT]

If you want to experiment with GRUB without writing anything to your drive:
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=4622

[cjanscen]

I like grub because you don't have to run it after every change you make (new kernels)....yeah that is pretty lame but it is jut one less thing to have to remember to do.

[Chadduss]

To me there really never was much of a difference. I used to use lilo because it came with Mandrake. But then I installed Grub because it was part of the Gentoo install documentation. Is there much difference during normal use? Nominal