LILO is plain ugly
 

How could I get a beautified version of lilo? :D
I know the one from RH is *really* nice - graphical and stuff. ;)
Did anyone tried another version? How could I change the looks on my lilo boot menu?

And where could I find the sources of lilo or another app that is included in the debian packs?

Could I expect problems when I recompile lilo - like rendering my machine unbootable?

RH doesn't use LILO but GRUB.

This is available for debian just

apt-get install grub

Read the instructions carefully. and make sure you have a bootable floppy just in case you ruin your MBR.

If you need further help with grub, let me know your hard drive setup, and whats curretly in your /boot and I'll lead you through the process.

To get sources for debian packages

apt-get source the_program_you_want_the_source_too

I used rh 7.2 and it had lilo and grub(not at the same time :D)- not starting a fight

I know they were planning to go to grub only but I left rh for debian :D

And I don't like grub that much, so beatified lilo is my choice... but how?

i think those packaged linuxes like RH, SuSE, Mdk customized LILO for their distros. but supposedly LILO 22.x supports some sort of at least limited graphical mode. this might be of interest:

http://www.gamers.org/~quinet/lilo/index.html

>edit to add i used LILO with Red Hat, also.

You need to add

bitmap=/your/bitmap.bmp
bmp-colors= (set for your image)
bmp-table= (set for your image)
bmp-timer= (set for your image)

to your lilo.conf

the image has to be 640x480 pixels and 16 colors.

look at the lilo.conf man pages for more details.

Can't stand LILO myself, Grubs much easier to sort out.

:cool: the man pages do it again. :D

i like grub, i want it on my slack

There's a problem putting grub on slack?

just my procrastination

did anyone tried this?
 

And made it work?

A Graphical LILO interface is possible
 

If you take a look at Mandrake, for example, all they do is add a map= line, a vga= line, a message= line and a menu scheme line and they come up with a pretty nice looking boot loader, and all it does is call LILO. They don't do anything fancy with GRUB, but if you look at Red Hat or Gentoo Linux as examples, they add visual graphics to their GRUB boot loader implementations. It's pretty clear from this that it doesn't take a lot to add a graphical appearance to a boot loader, so if you're missing it and you want to add it, or if you have it and you want to change it (or remove it), it's not that difficult to do. You do have to look at the /boot directory on a few systems to get an idea of how it's actually done. One easy way to do that is to try out several different software distributions.

Just so you don't think this can't be done on a Debian system, take a look at either LindowsOS or Xandros, both of which have used LILO as their default boot loader. Both of them have very nice graphical boot loaders - so nice, in fact, you'd have no clue that they're actually using LILO, but last I checked, both companies use LILO as their default boot loader in their software.

cd /usr/doc/lilo<version>

And read til you are blue in the face :D

Cool

On one of my systems, I found that even the man page for lilo.conf provides a lot of good information. It turns out that you can have either a text, menu, or bitmap display when you boot using the LILO boot loader. You can set colors, you can add fancy splash screens, and there is probably enough information right in the lilo.conf page to figure this all out.

Try it, and if you run into problems, send us the contents of your lilo.conf file. Remember that with LILO, you need to run the LILO program each time you change the configuration file (For me, personally, that's one reason I prefer to use GNU GRUB, I can simply edit a text menu.lst file and without running any other configuration program, I can change the boot menu. I only have to run a configuration program with GRUB if I want to install GRUB on a different partition or a different boot record. I can do all the same stuff with flashy screens, or I can keep it simple. But either LILO or GRUB do a fine job, use whatever you're most comfortable with and what's available to you.

I did it and it looks really fine!!!!
 

I made it !!
A little gimp work, a little editing of lilo.conf and it works!!!

My lilo.conf right now looks like this (relevant parts for this issue)

:study: And yes, MasterC and synaptical were right I just RFM. Stupid me!! :D

I learned that I should read the man a long time ago, when I compiled the kern for the first time and did it from the first try!

I guess I forgot or got lazy ...
:scratch: