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  Original subject: [TCLUG:9225] GRUB (GRand Unified Bootloader) [Was: LILO: eas

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-------- Original Message Text --------
After reading Fred Olson's note regarding choosing which OS to boot, I
started looking around for bootloaders and things.  The best one I came
across was GNU GRUB [http://www.gnu.org/software/grub]  After trying it
out, I think LILO's days are numbered (at least on my system).

Anyone who has ever had LILO come to a screeching halt on bootup knows
that LILO is a finicky little thing.  Certainly, GRUB isn't the perfect
solution, but it's better than LILO.  If you make a LILO boot disk for
your computer (i.e., a diskette that only has LILO on it, which points
to a kernel on your hard disk), you have to make a new disk whenever you
make a new kernel or move the one that was already there.  LILO knows
the sector where the kernel is supposed to be, but if the kernel isn't
there, all LILO can do is give you some silly two-byte error code.

GRUB, on the other hand, wouldn't have any trouble.  It doesn't locate
kernels or other files by their sector on the hard drive, it locates
them by the easier-to-understand method of path and filename.  GRUB can
read filesystems such as EXT2, FAT, MINIX and Amiga FFS (and I'm sure it
wouldn't be too hard to get it to read others..)  With GRUB, there is no
more problem of 'oops, I forgot to re-run LILO after re-compiling'
(well, if you do it right, at least ;-)

I would encourage anyone who has had headaches over LILO to try out
GRUB..  I had a little trouble understanding the documentation at first,
but it just takes a little studying..



Oh, and before I forget, I was thinking that using the printer port to
decide which OS to boot might be a good idea.  Printers have an ACK line
that is activated when they're turned on (or something like that). 
However, I don't know if the printer port would have to be initialized
first or anything in order to find the status of the printer.  Whatever
it is, I'm sure it's fairly easy to do (well, for someone who knows how
to program that sort of thing).

Just consider your printer a very large dongle ;-)

-- 
 _  _  _  _ _  ___    _ _  _  ___ _ _  __   I give advice worth the 
/ \/ \(_)| ' // ._\  / - \(_)/ ./| ' /(__   price -- free! 
\_||_/|_||_|_\\___/  \_-_/|_|\__\|_|_\ __)                            
[ Mike Hicks | http://umn.edu/~hick0088 | mailto:hick0088@tc.umn.edu ]

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