I'm reading up on BSD, getting ready to install FreeBSD on an "old" Athlon 1000MHz system (as soon as I get a hard drive for it ). I've done a little bit of looking in the threads here, and it seems you can use bootloaders like LILO and Grub. However, when I came across a kernel compilation guide here, it said to just type something like boot kernel.kernelname to load whatever kernel. So what I am wondering is, does BSD use its own bootloader by default, forcing you to install LILO manually? Or, do you have the option to install it during BSD's installation process?

You don't have to use BSD's boot loader.

I currently have lilo (in the mbr) booting bsd,gnu/linux, and windows.

It's just a line like this:

other=/dev/hda2
label=FreeeBSD

When you boot to BSD, you there will be another loader (I don't know the technical language for this one) which prompts you with a few boot options, one of them being to drop to a prompt, where you can issue 'boot kernel.old' (the default spot for your old kernel if you install a new one).

Have fun! (and enjoy the beauty of BSD!!!)

So that's all the bigger the BSD section of lilo.conf has to be? Wow.

So, does BSD automatically install its bootloader in the MBR, or do you have the option to skip that step during install? (I would assume you would be given the option to skip it, but just checking)

Yeah, you got a choice. It comes up pretty quick, when you are partitioning your slices (before you install any software).

Although if you are installing this on clean hardware, you are (probably) gonna want to use their boot loader, then install lilo once you can boot the system.

I don't see why not to use the FreeBSD boot loader... It works just fine with multiple systems (Don't install windows after or you will have more trouble and work ahead because it cleans the MBR).

You can run LILO or Grub, that's fine, but there won't be major differences.