I completely disagree with that formula because I don't find working with LILO painful, exactly because it is manual. It does what I tell it to, no more, no less. It is far more painful to me to have to suss out what some stupid automation did to screw things up for the sake of convenience. A bootloader thast dfoes only6 that and not a bunch of bells and whistles is highly preferable to me. If you prefer GRUB that's no skin off my nose but just because you prefer it does not mean it is de fact what is best for everyone.Once again, LILO does one simple job and does it well and many like that.

There exists a plethora of fine, feature-full vehicles that make various specific jobs easier (or even possible) and enjoyable but if all I wish to do is visit my next-door neighbor, I'll choose to walk. The right tool for the job has deep meaning to me especially when combined with KISS..

What self-indulgent nonsense. You can set up grub manually if you want to. The grub configuration file for a simple lilo-like menu will look very much like lilo's simple lilo-like menu: look at the manually-written EFI/BOOT/grub.cfg file in the slackware64-14.2/slackware64-current tree for an example. Having looked at it, please then state how you think the appropriate lilo.conf file would be better.

All this boils down to is that you have taken the trouble to understand how lilo works but not how grub works.

I grant you that grub.cfg is at least reasonable (despite the fact that grub warns against manual editing) and maybe it is partly true what you say about my preference but

1) Despite the fact I have spent far more time in and with LILO, it isn't as if I have spent no time with GRUB and GRUB2 and going over the docs as well since being a multiboot system for well over 20 years I have found some distros not only default to GRUB(2) but resist accepting LILO. How would I even come to the conclusion above that I find OSProber is a royal pita if I've never spent time working with Grub just for one example?

2) As for your assessment of "self-indulgent" I say "Of course! It's MY PC! Who do you imagine I should indulge instead?"

I fully understand that GRUB, even legacy grub, does more than LILO can do but that is exactly the point from my POV. I don't want nor need fancier splash screens or automated kernel discovery. I like that LILO is simple and tests itself and I liked it early on which is NOT the case with GRUB. Years later, and a second iterationI still don't like it and like it less than the original and that's my preference and prerogative, right?

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That is your prerogative: more generally, you are of course entitled to your own opinion and preferences. However, you are not entitled to your own version of the facts.

If you don't want fancy splash screens or automated kernel discovery, then don't use them. You absolutely do not need to use OS Prober (in fact, I make 30_os-prober unexecutable). Instead write a grub.cfg file yourself, which will be very similar (in fact, slightly simpler) than your lilo.conf file.

Anyway, lilo is irrelevant to the issue because the OP was inquiring about a UEFI installation.

You may be right because I don't yet use UEFI (I'm in Legacy Mode) but I have read docs on eLilo and it appears to me to be very simple, far more along the lines of LILO than Grub but then the fact that you consider Grub.cfg to be simpler than lilo.conf just reflects your preference. So it is not irrelevant. You'd just prefer it was.

I currently have 3 Operating Systems using Grub2 on my Main and every one has OSProber disabled and I wrote my own grub.cfg for each, so I am not as ignorant as you seem to imagine I am. It is NOT similar, nor is it simpler than writing lilo.conf at the very least to me, and many more like me.

Is it possible you are a newcomer to Slackware, coming from a grub-based distro? My bias for LILO is probably largely due to having used Slackware as my Main for over 20 years. I suspect you have put in time elsewhere or are you a long-time Slacker who decided to try out Grub and liked it right off the bat?.

I've never used either (haven't had a need). I've heard only good things about rEFInd (only reason I haven't used it is because elilo is default for UEFI booting and works fine on my system and rEFInd is a 3rd-party program, so I'd have to build it after installing), but word on the street is that while grub is extremely powerful, it can be quite the steep learning curve and can be difficult to get tweaked and maintained properly.

While lilo and elilo both have limitations, they are very simple. And if you build your own kernels, elilo is no different than anything else since you can just transfer your move/copy your kernel directly to the ESP, skipping /boot altogether, and mkinitrd supports specifying the file location, so you can just choose the ESP when creating it.

But if Slackware were to switch to rEFInd or grub for the default bootloader, I'd likely switch to them as well, just out of shear laziness. I'll take the time to learn what I need to learn (which is what I did with elilo once I switched to UEFI booting) if the switch occurs, but otherwise, I don't see the point. I don't spend much time with bootloaders (my computers tend to stay on 24/7 unless I need to reboot for a kernel or major system upgrade), and copying my kernel and initrd to the ESP (I still keep a copy in /boot out of habit) and modifying elilo.conf takes me 20 seconds whenever I upgrade my kernel (which is probably not as often as I should be updating).

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Well, lilo will not be an option for new machines Intel powered after next year, as Intel will cease to provide the CSM. And elilo is still good, but for limited use cases.

Since version 14.2.1.2 Slint uses only GRUB, but for booting the installation media or a rescue boot stick in Legacy mode, for which we still use isolinux/syslinux. Even that won't last. The next Slint ISO will use GRUB exclusively in both EFI and Legacy modes, as will the rescue boot stick: I have checked the feasibility of that with GRUB2.04RC1. True, GRUB does need some learning, but learning doesn't hurt. Among the benefits: it makes multiboot very easy, as well as detecting other OS and making rescue boot media.

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That's a good heads up Didier but I'm not sure it's happening quite that fast. The newest X299 chipset with LGA2066 socket does indeed not seem to have CSM at least in any brands I've seen so far, but the only slightly older Z390 w/ LGA 1151 does have CSM and it supports a far wider range of CPUs than does X299/2066. The biggest difference is use case, and neither is likely to go away soon.

Obviously with almost twice the pins, a 2066 CPU can have far more cores so use cases that benefit from many cores should and likely will chose that platform. However and especially now that Z390 can address more than 64GB RAM and as much as X299 can, the number of cores remains the major issue and some use cases do not benefit from lots of cores. It looks to me like Z390 still has some life in it to say the least.

I find midnight commander (`mc`) with its in-built editor (F4) a great tool for updating kernels:
start-it up as root; `cd /boot` in one panel (if needed, run `mkinitrd -c -k <new kernel> -F` to use the /etc/mkinitrd.conf with common settings)
and in the other (if /etc/fstab has been set up not to do this automatically) 'mount /boot/efi' and `cd EFI/Slackware/`;
copy (F5) what is needed from one side to the other (or delete what is not needed, F8);
if kernel numbers need changing edit elilo.conf (F4) and save (F2) it.
'umount /boot/efi' (otherwise the fat32 file system will be left with a dirty bit; unmounting before halt/reboot prevents this)
done (F10)

[QUOTE=brobr;6011599]Good tip. I set it to not mount automatically in /etc/fstab, and only mount it whenever I do a kernel update... Then unmount it before turning off the computer.

Thanks for the posts. This discussion on boot loaders is very interesting. A couple of years ago I went through many of the ideas mentioned. At the time my thinking was this: "Humm...What do the BDFL and Alien Bob use for their installers--for the boot sticks, for the distro media etc?" The answer appeared to be Syslinux. My thinking went--"Look at all the different situations their boot loader handles—hey, it’s used by new guys, gurus, gunslingers with flash drives on their key rings and such. Well... Why don't I try that one?" I did. It was not a shallow learning curve, but the docs are there, and since it’s used for the Slackware installer itself, I construed that as a kind of de facto support for it. It was the old, “Watch what experts do rather than listen to what they say.” <grin>

So much for my thinking—Didier posts that syslinux is going away and now I need to learn Grub/Grub2.
<Sigh> All things pass.

I’ll just note that Syslinux has worked whenever I've used it. I’m about to try it on a Lenovo laptop to boot -current. Picking a boot loader really doesn't happen that often. Good... When I've needed to do it, the learning curve was neither simple nor super difficult—just a bit aggravating...

--Lawrence

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@letitgo: even for booting the installation media or a rescue boot stick in BIOS aka Legacy mode in next Slint ISO we will use grub. "info grub" is a must read

@Didier Spaier:
-- Thanks, it's a must read indeed. I hadn't thought to look at the info file. Grub has an interesting history.

--Lawrence