I have to agree with Woodsman here. I must admit - although I mostly use lilo (out of laziness really) - it bugs me keeping image names (labels) short. Just my moan for the day

I second that!

Lilo is simple and works, I use it on my desktop, however Grub is a lot more flexible and makes it easier to recover if you mess something up.
I use Grub on my netbook because I do more messing round with kernels etc on it than on my desktop.

From a distro-builder's point of view I would like to add that it seems not to be possible to compile grub on a 64-bit system (pure 64-bit, not multilib).

But I would suspect it's actually tradition and there is already a menu-driven system in place and all slackware users already know how to use it and new users quickly find out how to use it.

I personally found lilo easier to use... but then when i was new to linux I had used grub first and didn't know anything.

Additionally, grub2 is still under development and grub 1 does not support compilation on pure 64 bit. So there is even more reason to stick with lilo now that 64bit slackware is coming out.

I'm relatively a new user and I found learning basics of lilo pretty easy and fast. I'm stuck with unbootable Fedora 11 on my test partition because I don't understand a thing about grub, I tried many manuals but for me is pretty hard ...

So my vote to lilo because it's easy like typing lilo in command prompt

...I like it better! (I acknowledge that may not be a valid reason for others!)

Actually, I have always used LILO and have never been unable to get it to do exactly what I want, even on more complex boot arrangements. Although I have had to give some of them a little thought...

I cannot compare LILO to grub because I have never successfully used grub for anything other than temporary evaluation type installs. My only attempt to actually learn and use grub ended dismally about 2005, after MUCH wasted time. It turned out to be a grub bug as I recall with the advice to "upgrade to the latest grub"... so it is still LILO for me!

IMHO LILO's strength is that it's syntax and operation are very closely tied to the underlying concepts - if you get one you get the other, and that makes it easy to use. From what admittedly little I have seen of it, grub tries to hide at least some of that connection to the concepts to 'make it easy'... always a mistake.

Now, where is that 2-cents icon?

Does grub have the ability to boot from RAID1 yet? (that is without the ugly hack of installing it to each drive separately)

Lilo has the raid-extra-boot option to provide booting from RAID1 but grub never used to be able to do this.

Hi,

'LILO' is my main bootloader but it too is still a tool. There are many bootloader available to the user to select from. 'GRUB' is another choice that has some advantages to it for some users. Remember that 'GRUB' is actually a 'bootloader command shell'.

Heck, 'Ranish' is another that can be used for bootloading. It too is just another tool that has some advantages the others don't have.

I think a user should be wise enough to choose the tool that suits the task at hand.

So does Lilo
liloconfig -> expert mode -> Install to floppy disk - more or less

I don't have a problem with rescue disk, especially when I created one during installation and it serves the purpose, it's enough to start the system and fix whatever I messed up.
If I want to have rescue usb with my current kernel i run
So I don't really see an advantage here

I admit that can come handy if you're not patient enough and want to run fresh installed system right away.
But than you have to login to the main system anyway if you want to keep the changes.
So this one has slight advantage over lilo, but not really something that I can't live without or can make me want to switch to grub

I like to keep it short so I never noticed that really.
what about kernel version instead Linux 1, Linux 2 etc...
I use lilo because it's simple and does the job, loads the system, that's it.
But yet again it's just a personal choice.

for what it's worth, the main difference between Grub and Lilo is that Grub needs drivers for various filesystems and harddisks to get from stage 1 to stage 2 (from the top of my head) where stage 2 is reading the menu.lst; Lilo does not use that and as such is less prone to needing a driver for one or another filesystem.

The difference in that aspect is probably the reason for choosing one or the other with a given distribution. Slackware chose Lilo, others chose Grub, the reasons are all pretty valid. People finding one or the other lacking can still switch and distributing both in one distro would result in confusing things, so you really will want to replace one with the other if that will suit your needs.

I'm actually thinking of switching to LILO because I recently installed GRUB 2 and find it's a lot more complicated and arcane than the earlier version. With the older legacy grub, everything was simple in /boot/grub/menu.lst, but in grub 2.0 there are a bunch of files in /etc/grub.d/ which you must edit if you want to configure it and then run grub-update to generate the actual config file (which is a lot more unreadable now than before).

I don't know the ideals of grub - it is a very powerful boot manager, no doubt and its shell is very useful on occasion. But since legacy grub no longer gets updated so much, I guess users will be forced to upgrade to 2 sooner or later.