Re: [Staffslug] Fed6, Ubuntu, Mandriva or PcBSD?

On Wed, 2007-01-03 at 11:49 +0000, Andrew Edwards wrote: Well, GRUB [1] is stand alone in every sense, and possibly the best thing since sliced bread, but LILO is only really useful if you're running a Linux kernel on your GNU system. GRUB works well on a floppy, or anywhere else you want to put it, has an easy-to-understand command line completion, and is very flexible. iow stick with GRUB ;-) I think the OP said something about GUIs - I'd say that for a task as limited, yet with as many options as boot loading, a GUI wouldn't add much, but many OS installers give a GUI interface to setting up GRUB (or do it without you noticing, like Ubuntu). GRUB itself can default to a menu (with a default boot option for your preferred OS and kernel), which is fine for every day, and then you can drop to its cli when needed. Like all bootloaders nowadays it is far to big to fit on the reserved sector above the partition table, and generally lives in /boot on your main *nix install, but if you chop and change unixen a lot, just give it its own partition. We had a very informative talk on GRUB at sc.lug three years ago, from Owen LeBlanc. I also seem to remember writing an article on GRUB a few years back, but Google tells me it's not online, so I suspect it was in LinuxUser& Developer, who don't put their back issues online :-/ Anyway, if you're using one OS, or have a dozen partitions and keep swapping between the Hurd, Atheos/Syllable, OpenBSD, Haiku, FreeDOS, ReactOS and several flavours of GNU/Linux, then GRUB is the bootloader for you :-) - Richard [1] GRUB: http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/grub.html