FreeOS.com: GRUB: Multi-boot without LILO!

“LILO is one of the most widely used bootloaders on multi-boot
systems. Another open source alternative coming up is GRUB (GRand
Unified Bootloader). We came across GRUB during a Mandrake
installation, which brought up this article as we were curious to
see what it was and how it could replace LILO.”

“GRUB, unlike LILO, is able to read filesystems and
recognize kernel images too. While LILO requires the physical
location of the kernel on your drive, GRUB does not. Even the
latest filesystem ReiserFS is supported. This means that you
don’t have to re-install GRUB every time you make a change to the
config file or install a new kernel. If your BIOS supports LBA then
there is also no problem reading beyond 1024 cylinders. There’s
some good support for network booting of diskless clients. On the
other hand, GRUB installation can be a bit of a problem. Maybe
we’re all too used to LILO or maybe GRUB still has some way to go?
Little of both we think.”

“GRUB can be obtained from ftp://alpha.gnu.org:/gnu/grub/. The
official page where you can look for documentation and FAQ’s is
http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/ . According to the site, the
software hasn’t been released publicly and the various releases are
merely test releases. We haven’t faced problems setting up and
booting GRUB but there are several known bugs and missing features
that might trip you up. The latest release as of writing this
article is 0.5.96.1 and this is what we’ll be using here.”

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