FC4t2 no good without LILO

[Mike Bird]

On Fri, 2005-04-15 at 07:14, Colin Charles wrote:
> > We've shown that Redhat has not supported Lilo in years - Lilo just
> > works.  Pretty much all that Redhat needs to do is leave it alone and
> > let it be built and distributed automatically.
> 
> Why? So that more bugs can get filed on it, and the poor maintainer has
> to look at code that even upstream finds almost dead/useless?

Colin,

Grub is obsolete and unmaintained upstream, and Grub 2 is pre-alpha and
only available from CVS.

Lilo, OTOH, works fine and is maintained upstream (22.7 was released
April 12th).  Sure it would be nice to have the current version in RH
instead of a five year old version, but the five year old version is
still way more reliable, more predictable, and better documented than
RH's Grub 0.95.  (Grub 0.96 was released before Grub died but RH didn't
adopt it.)

Admittedly Grub is less of a problem for newbies.  We're not quite sure
why.  There seems to be a bug in the version of Emacs used at RH which
prevents the addition of "/sbin/lilo\n" to kernel package scripts.  But
that's OK - if RH shareholders want to spend money on maintaining an
obsolete boot loader alongside Lilo I don't mind.

The RH Lilo maintainer has done nothing for years because there was
nothing to be done.  Lilo works.  Despite the fictions presented on this
list, it would cost RH next to nothing to retain Lilo alongside Grub. 
As with so much else RH, this is all about religion.  Throw out
Linuxconf, Lilo, Koffice, Abiword, Gnumeric, etc and substitute some RH
staffer's pet rock.

As for Eclipse, it can easily be added post-install.  A boot loader is a
different kettle of fish.  There are workarounds of varying complexity
for installing FC4 with Lilo.  In many cases one can simply install with
Grub and then overwrite with Lilo.  Sometimes it's more difficult.

It gives small client-oriented firms yet another advantage over RedHel's
edicts-from-on-high approach, so we complain because of the unnecessary
extra install work but we don't complain too much.  RH did a good job of
making Anaconda handle MD and LVM, so we probably won't switch until
another distro can match that.

--Mike Bird