On Sunday 16 March 2003 14:00, David Walser wrote: > Austin wrote: > > On 2003.03.16 13:16 Danny Tholen wrote: > >> yes this is annoying. Lilo labels are limited to 10 chars IIRC.
It's more than 10; I can't remember how many exactly, but I can tell you that "2.4.21-14mm-cus" fits, but "linux-2.4.21-14mm-custom" does not. Which brings up a point: Maybe it's worth dropping the "linux-" prefix from the labels of extra kernels? I realize that it might be a little unclear for some users. (On the other hand, what else could it "2.4.21-1mm" be? I can't think of any OS that has a 2.4 release in the recent past (how long ago was OpenBSD 2.4?). However, if Mandrake is going to use lilo, and lilo has a limit of <somewhere above but not too far above 10 characters>, maybe isn't it much worse to have the install scripts add a label to lilo.conf that stops lilo from working? > > Does grub suffer the same disability? > > Most other distros use grub by default. Why don't we? Does "most other distros" mean Redhat? I know they switched not too long ago (7.2, I think?), and SUSE around the same time (8.1), but I think most of the others--including distros as diverse as Conectiva, Slackware, and ASP--and still using lilo. Is this because they're being overly cautious? > We did for one release, hopefully we never do again. It was a disaster > and a support nightmare. In my experience, grub has some cool advantages when trying to recover a machine in disarray if you can't boot off CD or floppy; other than that, most of its advantages don't really matter. I know, grub can handle more complicated setups, but lilo works fine for me on a machine that boots linux, FreeBSD, and Windows XP of a pair of hardware RAID arrays, and another that boots linux, BeOS, and Windows98 off an 4-channel IDE setup; how much more compicated am I likely to need? I'm sure there are some situations where grub works and lilo doesn't, so it's good that Mandrake supports it, but I don't see any reason to switch to grub as default.
