[GLLUG] Fun with LILO

[Matt Graham]

On Tuesday 03 June 2003 16:08, after a long battle with technology, 
Chick Tower wrote:
> I just had an interesting go-round in my first attempt to set up
> LILO.  The two distros use different versions of the Linux kernel. 
> However, whenever I installed
> LILO from one of the distros and used it to make my selection upon
> boot, both distros would report using the version of the kernel for
> whichever distro I had used to install LILO in the MBR, which caused
> problems for the other distro.  

So there's no common /boot partition; each distro has its own /boot ?  
This can cause problems if you don't set things up right.  If you have 
multiple Linux distros on one machine, the thing to do is to have one 
small /boot partition that's shared among all distros.  You put your 
kernel images in there and call them /boot/vmlinuz-redhat-2.4.6 , 
/boot/vmlinuz-gentoo-2.4.20 , etc.  

If you have things set up like this:

/dev/hda1   FAT32   'Doze
/dev/hda2   extended
/dev/hda5   ext3    Mandrake /
/dev/hda6   ext3    Redhat   /
/dev/hda7   swap    swap

...then for your LILO to work right, you must do something like this:

(from Mandrake)
mount /dev/hda6 /mnt/redhat/
(edit /etc/lilo.conf)

image = /boot/vmlinuz-mandrake
   initrd = /boot/initrd
   append="hdc=ide-scsi"
   vga=775

image = /mnt/redhat/boot/vmlinuz-redhat
   initrd = /mnt/redhat/boot/initrd
   append="hdc=ide-scsi"
   vga=whatever

...etcetera.

> Both had a /boot/map file, 

Huh?  What, precisely, do you mean here?  LILO uses a file somewhere on 
disk (default /boot/map) as its "loading map".  This file contains the 
raw sector positions of all the files that LILO might have to load.  If 
LILO is being used as the main bootloader, there should be exactly one 
loading map, otherwise you can lose unexpectedly.

> figured out how to use grub (which came only with Mandrake) to make
> my boot selections.

GRUB wins out over LILO if only because you don't have to remember to 
rerun /sbin/lilo every time you change the configuration file.

-- 
   I went to edit my info to change "system administrator type dude" to
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   --MegaHAL, trained on Netizen's quotes file
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