I haven't had to edit lilo.conf in years. After a kernel update, I just run 'lilo' and it works.


For elilo I don't edit anything or move anything, I just run eliloconfig and it works.

As for grub, now that I know about grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg, I'll just run that after an update.

I have resisted every change for as long as I could. Because of that, I haven't found a single machine that elilo hasn't worked on. I'm not saying that you're wrong about elilo not working, I'm just saying that I didn't adopt it until I had to and it seems alot of bugs were worked out. There's a benefit to being a late-adopter.

When Slackware defaults to grub, I'll adopt grub but as long as lilo and elilo still suit my needs, I'm sticking with them.

I have no problem with elilo on my Lenovo, which looks like a tower but apparently is a laptop internally.

You need to remember that UEFI files are normal files on a normal (vfat) partition. Once you have that partition mounted on /boot/efi, you can use standard file-handling commands to manage the bootloader(s). You don't need to install anything in the mbr or whatever. If you have GRUB installed, the UEFI boots GRUB64.efi. If you have elilo, it boots elilo.efi.

For an elilo multiboot, you need to copy over the textmenu chooser file from /usr/doc/elilo/examples. Then copy your kernel and initrd to the same partition and edit edit elilo.conf to find them.

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Ah! Must be the way your update method works. Perhaps it does all that for you, automatically. Certainly on a stock Slackware install you would need to do as I suggested.

BTW, if you want to customise grub, the way to do it is to edit the /etc/default/grub file, and then run This way you can easily restore your preferred default settings if they get overwritten by an update.

By way of example, here's my /etc/default/grub file:
Setting the default to "saved" will make it boot whatever you chose to run last time. This is very handy if you are dual booting with (shudder) windoze. Windoze will often reboot several times when updating, and setting the default to "saved" means it will reboot back into windows and can be left unattended to reboot.

Setting the timeout to 3 and the style to "hidden" means that only a very brief and small prompt will be visible for you to hit the "esc" key and enter the full menu to select what you want to boot (assuming you want to change).

The GFXMODE is to set the monitor resolution for the menu, and the GFXPAYLOAD item hands that same resolution to the kernel when it starts to boot. Without the GFXPAYLOAD item, you won't get the initial "penguin" screen on some systems.

Finally, setting "GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER=false" will enable grub to search for other operating systems (windoze, etc) and allow them to be booted from grub.

Small tweaks, but those are my personal preferences.

Remember to run after you have edited /etc/default/grub, and don't be tempted to edit /boot/grub/grub.cfg directly as it may well get overwritten!

Best of luck,

--
Pete

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I do.

I said "many", would you care to tell me the numerical percentage that "many" equals? I didn't say a "majority"... I didn't say "most"... I didn't even say "widely". Your butt-hurt over your perceived wrong is what bugs me.

...and it is true. Before I posted on here, I asked some of my Slackware using friends and you know what they said (paraphrase): "I don't know that grub stuff I don't run Debian."



I didn't twist your arm to read the message, you could have just scrolled on by.

Yes, not knowing how to use something that is NOT part of a default Slackware setup (that MANY of us don't use) is the height of ignorance, we should all be ashamed. Slackware maintainers don't make it the default boot manager because they want us to learn to configure it ourselves.

But what REALLY bugs me is your belief that people who don't need grub, don't use grub, haven't drank the grub Koolaid and therefore don't know grub are "a bunch of ignorant people". That is the height of hypocrisy and snobbism.


The funny thing is that IF you had provided this information initially and not played the "he called me stupid" victim, THAT would have been useful.

Fact of the matter is, you have made multiple posts and the only one helpful is the one about encryption. All the others are about your perception of me calling you stupid to strangers.

The correct answer here is don't respond to my posts. EVEN if you know the answer, I don't want to hear it from you. If you see my name, scroll by.

Since 2004, you have not helped me once and I don't see it happening in my future.

To everyone else who has responded, I thank you for the input.

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Note that Slackware does not run any grub2 scripts, so editing grub.cfg directly is perfectly fine.
Only users who opt for grub-mkconfig must write /etc/default/grub, rest of us do what we want with grub.cfg.
This is because Slackware maintainer was kind enough to let us do what we want with it.

If you want my honest opinion, writing "DO NOT EDIT" into a conf file is as useless as writing the word "CAT" on a dog,
If that uselessness was forced upon us by the installer, I'd just rip it out and use grub-legacy.

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Yep, I WILL have to learn grub I think that it's inevitable that Slackware will make it default.

Maybe I'll play with it on my ONE mutli-boot computer.

If I screw up grub's configuration will the BIOS UEFI selection still work?

You can also select a submenu item as follows :

This will automatically select the 6th item (here it is the generic kernel) in the Grub submenu after selecting the 1st item in the top-level menu, with indexes starting at 0.

As an aside, I eventually worked out how to configure Grub, and found it much easier when dealing with more complex disk setups. LVM on top of mdadm RAID-1, for example.

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You're welcome!

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How do you remove grub and re-install lilo on Linode Slackware 15?

ANSWER:

If you are using the LISH consoles, use the GLISH console, NOT the WEBLISH. The weblish misbehaves with ncurses.

I know nothing about elilo (I’m a GRUB user), and I’m only just becoming familiar with UEFI, so I’m anything but an expert with respect to your question, but if you know how to get elilo installed in a working state, then I it is my understanding you could just do so. If my understanding is correct, then UEFI should subsequently allow you to boot either GRUB or elilo (but how to do so appears to be highly system-dependent). Then, once you are satisfied that the elilo option works fine, you should be able to delete the files that provide GRUB support from your EFI System Partition and GRUB should be gone (though you may have to take some additional action to remove it from whichever boot selection mechanism that your system uses).

I hope I’m making some kind of sense here, but if I don’t, then I hope someone else can shed some light on this issue, and enlighten me, too.

luvr-

So I originally asked about removing grub(2) from Linode's new Slack15 disk images and installing elilo because my train of thought went-

"All of Linode's previous Slackware images use lilo, they must have switched to grub because their VMs now use UEFI"...

It turns out that Linode's VMs DON'T use UEFI, lilo is what works. Apparently, the image builder just likes grub.

Remove the grub package and run the regular Slackware lilo setup script and it works fine.

IF they had used UEFI, I'm pretty sure that:
...would work.

There was no need to remove the grub package that comes with a default installation of slackware that uses the lilo bootlaoder unless there is limited storage space. Liloconfig will configure the lilo.conf configuration file and install lilo boot code into the mbr replacing the grub boot code. "slackpkg remove grub" does not remove /boot/grub folder, /etc/grub.d folder, or the /etc/default/grub file.

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On my new Linode-server (which has Slackware installed) I ran "mount", and I see "/dev/sda" is mounted on "/", and I see there is no EFI partition mounted. Also, the Linode configuration webpage for this server makes no mention of an EFI partition.

In "/dev/sda" I noticed there is no partition number specified, so I ran "gdisk". As I suspected, there is NO partition table. From previous experience I realize it is not a problem to have no partition table, however I wonder where LILO (or GRUB) puts the master boot record?

For LILO it wouldn't be a problem. One of the options in any LILO install is to put it into the first sector of your root partition, where it would normally be chainloaded by some other bootloader. So it could equally go into the first sector of an unpartitioned disk. But GRUB2 is bigger than LILO. Normally a GRUB stub goes into the MBR and the rest of it gets shoehorned into a gap between the MBR and the first partition. I don't know what the equivalent would be in your case.