As some of you may know, I added a M.2 NVMe drive to my system, and as a result, had to switch my bootloader to GRUB, since (at the time) it had support for NVMe, whereas LILO did not.

I'm happy to report, as a result of timsoft's patches, I am now able to "resurrect" LILO, and use it as my bootloader once again. A big shout-out to him for submitting the patch. Yes, I do like booting in legacy mode; I'm not yet ready to switch to UEFI. Legacy still works for me, and I don't see that changing anytime soon.

LILO works better for me than GRUB, and while GRUB wasn't bad, its only fault is that it wasn't LILO.

Thanks again!!

I found grub2 to be annoyingly inflexible and automatic. It's basically not possible to adjust the order of entries in the list (outside of manually editing an automatically generated file, which is not recommended), and have fun jumping through hoops if you want to use a sub-entry as the default.

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Here here! or Hear Here! whichever you prefer. The only advantage I've ever seen with any form of grub, legacy and especially grub2, is an expanded command altering option on-the-fly, but that comes at the expense of arcane, grub-specific terms, and a plethora of useless, often maddening complexity that serves no good purpose other than what some will call "convenience", by no means a net gain. I want a bootloader to be extremely simple, basically do one job and do it well and be easily human editable text config. LILO does all that and I hope it is available until the day I die.

I'm glad someone solved the NVME issue. Who says LILO is obsolete or not maintained?

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Sweet! I am all a-quiver. I have a M.2 NVME drive waiting for 15.0 (REAL SOON NOW!!!! or when it's ready, which ever comes first). I agree with enorbet, too much complexity for too little gain. LILO FTW.

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Thanks for the report 1337_powerslacker

And a BIG THANKS to timsoft for the patches.

I will be using lilo as long as my BIOSen allow legacy boot mode.

And ... we lilo luddites need to stick together

Thanks again !

-- kjh

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I love lilo.

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I'm quite frankly surprised at the response to my OP. LILO is more popular than I'd imagined.

For the record, there are some things I love about LILO:

1. When LILO pops up, you can hit the Tab key and enter the image name followed by the runlevel number. Useful for when you need to re-run the NVIDIA driver for each new iteration of the kernel.
2. You can customize easily the order in which your entries appear, as well as the default image.
3. You can specify the image that appears on your LILO boot screen. For example, I have the Slackware_Moonboot.bmp as my background image. Looks pretty cool, if I do say so myself (and I do!)
4. You can specify the VGA mode in which your boot messages appear. You don't have to settle for the default.

These are just the ones I find most useful. Others may point out additional benefits; I'd love to hear about them.

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I do it all the time. You add a script that runs during grub-mkconfig which runs prior to the others. (I've posted my copy in the forum more than once along with instructions.) I'm not on my Slackware machine at the moment and my use case isn't one where I'd prefer for windows to come up by default. For that latter case, you set GRUB_DEFAULT to point to the entry you want. See https://www.gnu.org/software/grub/ma...-configuration

You can also turn off os-prober and write the script manually. https://www.gnu.org/software/grub/ma...-manual-config

You can nonetheless not care for Grub and use lilo/elilo instead. I'm not married to any of them.

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Another LILO lover here! It's always been simple, reliable and flexible, and I will continue using it for as long as it works.

Been learning SYSLINUX against the day LILO ceases to be viable, but I'd much rather see LILO maintained into the future.

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Would you care to share your image to the slackware-wallpapers SlackBuild? If you are not the creator, some info about where you got it would be helpful too.

I have been slowly re-working the slackware-wallpapers SlackBuild and have been adding lilo boot images (currently 4) that will get installed into /boot/images in addition to the regular wallpapers.

I must admit - I left lilo behind long time ago ... the number of times I forgot to run lilo after changing the conf-file. Likewise - grub2 leaves me just stone cold ... but legacy grub is just awesome. Discontinued - yes it is, but has covered me for over 10 years now and will continue to do so as long as I don't use uefi.

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Since I can't attach the .bmp file directly, you are welcome to PM me directly so I can email you the file in question. As for the source, I got it from a site dedicated to Slackware 10.2 which, unfortunately, has gone offline, and I got the file some years ago, and don't recall the site address. It detailed how to modify the lilo.conf file to accommodate the bmp file. I will provide this file as well upon request.

I recently discovered that LILO gives us the tools for .bmp files once they fit even minimal size requirements. I can't believe it took me this long to understand that the command below does all the hard work....

So simple I should've known LILO would be like that. I guess all the "ancient and obsolete" FUD worked it's way into my psyche

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I'm using all 3 of them.

menu.lst

# Config file for GRUB - The GNU GRand Unified Bootloader
# /boot/grub/menu.lst

# DEVICE NAME CONVERSIONS
#
# Linux Grub
# -------------------------
# /dev/fd0 (fd0)
# /dev/sda (hd0)
# /dev/sdb2 (hd1,1)
# /dev/sda3 (hd0,2)
#

# FRAMEBUFFER RESOLUTION SETTINGS
# +-------------------------------------------------+
# | 640x480 800x600 1024x768 1280x1024
# ----+--------------------------------------------
# 256 | 0x301=769 0x303=771 0x305=773 0x307=775
# 32K | 0x310=784 0x313=787 0x316=790 0x319=793
# 64K | 0x311=785 0x314=788 0x317=791 0x31A=794
# 16M | 0x312=786 0x315=789 0x318=792 0x31B=795
# +-------------------------------------------------+
# for more details and different resolutions see
# https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php...fer_resolution

# general configuration:
timeout 3
default 3
color light-blue/black light-cyan/blue

# boot sections follow
# each is implicitly numbered from 0 in the order of appearance below
#
# TIP: If you want a 1024x768 framebuffer, add "vga=773" to your kernel line.
#
#-*


# (2) Windows
title Windows7 Pro64 (/dev/sda1)
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1


# lilo
title Slackware64-14.1 nouveau lilo (/dev/sda7)
root (hd0,6)
chainloader +1

# Linux bootable partition config begins
title Slackware64-14.1 nouveau (/dev/sda7)
root (hd0,6)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/sda7 ro vga=normal
# Linux bootable partition config ends


# lilo
title Slackware64-14.2 nvidia lilo (/dev/sda8)
root (hd0,7)
chainloader +1

# Linux bootable partition config begins
title Slackware64-14.2 nvidia (/dev/sda8)
root (hd0,7)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/sda8 ro vga=normal
# Linux bootable partition config ends

# other Linux using GRUB2
title Debian Jessie (/dev/sda9)
root (hd0,8)
chainloader +1

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I've grown to like not having to edit any files after upgrading the kernel, which grub2 allows.

I've got AMD processors on most of my machines and have been running this script as root prior to reboot after an upgrade...
(The make-amd-ucode-cpio.sh file is...
)

I've edited /etc/mkinitrd.conf as well, adding the line so everything is ready.

I upgrade the kernel (yes, that is stupidly risky versus an install, reboot, then uninstall the old one), run the first script, and then reboot.