GRUB v. Lilo from a newbies POV
 

Can someone tell me how a system is affected by choosing one boot loader over another?

At school, the professors make such a big deal about Lilo but I read on the net that GRUB is most likely to replace Lilo in the future.

It's just personal preference. They work the same.

It does not really matter which boot-loader you do use, Linux will run OK with either. I would suggest you make the choice depending on the professors ability to appreciate new tools ;)

Ok thanks. My professors were making it sound like there was some performance difference between the two. :rolleyes:

IMHO, grub takes it by a whisker for the ability to edit entries before you boot, pass kernel parameters etc without the boot-edit-reboot cycle you have to do with lilo.

Lilo does look cooler though. </flamebait>

LILO came before GRUB. Most mainstream distros are tending to move over to GRUB as the default.... so it's the way of the future (probably).
One thing I've noticed is that if you accumulate several kernels versions in GRUB through updates, customization etc, using rpm -e (erase) to remove old kernels also updates (ie removes) the corresponding entry from grub.conf.
With LILO I always had to edit it manually... obviously this only applies to rpm based distros.