FC4t2 no good without LILO

[Guy Fraser]

On Tue, 2005-12-04 at 23:51 -0400, Matthew Miller wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 12, 2005 at 05:23:48PM -0700, Mike Bird wrote:
> > So we have a package that is essential in some circumstances, that costs
> > next to nothing to maintain, and that takes up <0.1% of a CD's space. 
> 
> You're missing a huge part of the picture. Having lilo the package (even
> though as you note, it's not really maintained) might not be much, but it
> requires a lot of complicated kludgy infrastructure in the installer, and in
> mkinitrd, etc., and makes kernel updates very fragile.
> 
> *That's* what makes the developers want to drop it -- it's not just to make
> your life hard.
> 
Are you serious?

Maybe I haven't been using linux as long as you I have only been using
it since 1995. An I may be missing some information because I haven't 
done any kernel hacking, but what does mkinitrd have to do with LILO.

IIRC LILO and GRUB use the same initrd file when loading the kernel.

LILO is a freakin breeze to make changes and reinstall, one text file
one binary and thats whole pony show. If it fails, you will get a 
either 1 through 4 of the letters in the name or some other stream 
of characters. Check the documentation and discover what part of 
the boot process failed, and what most likely caused the problem.
Fix the problem and your done.

GRUB *is* a freakin kludge; take a well known device name 
map it to some new reference in one file, put the rest of the config 
in another file using the references to the drives as pointers to 
where to look for the files. Run a second program designed just to 
install the MBR on the real device name that you earlier had to 
create a reference for. Hope that nothing changes, in your 
drive ordering, and that the drive map you used is the same map 
that grub tries the next time you reboot. When it fails expect 
a numeric error with no supporting text. Check the documentation 
and discover it is generic and means a path or file is incorrect.
Check for additional resources, find 50 people with the same 
problem, but no solutions that work. Ask for help, get told to 
post a bugzilla report. Go to bugzilla discover many bugs 
already listed that are practicaly identical to yours, no 
presented solutions work for you, or the bug reporter, bug left 
outstanding. Give up or change your machine so that it conforms 
to what GRUB is limited to doing, reinstall because that is the 
only way you can get grub to allow you to boot, then limp along 
and get berated by the developers for not posting duplicate 
bugs.

You are not going to win anyone over from windows if they can't 
get there machine to run the same way it comes configured from 
the factory. Berating them and telling them they have 
misconfigured there machine because GRUB could not be the 
problem, take it or leave it, and they will leave it and tell 
anyone who will listen to leave it as well.

You do the whole community a disservice by snubbing your nose 
and taking a hard stance. Please remember Fedora Core is 
supposed to be a community project not a dictatorship project.

Knock Knock anyone there, for Pete sake!