[GLLUG] Re: Fun with LILO

[Chick Tower]

> Date: Tue, 3 Jun 2003 16:20:30 -0400
> From: Matt Graham <danceswithcrows at usa.net>
> Subject: Re: [GLLUG] Fun with LILO
> To: linux-user at egr.msu.edu
> Message-ID: <200306031620.30017.danceswithcrows at usa.net>
> Content-Type: text/plain;  charset="iso-8859-1"

> So there's no common /boot partition; each distro has its own /boot ?  
Yes, indeedy.

> 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.  
It would have been nice if the lilo.conf man page had suggested this. 
 It seems a fairly obvious situation for a multi-OS boot manager to 
face.
 
> 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.
Maybe that's why the wrong version of the kernel was being used by 
the OTHER distro of the two, no matter which one I used to install 
LILO.
 
> 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.
Which is exactly why I had wanted to use GRUB in the first place, 
but, since Vector Linux doesn't have GRUB, I thought I'd have to use 
LILO.  Luckily, I worked things out that way, anyway.

                    Chick