my biggest complaint with grubs interface is that it's a huge batle to get a text only boot menu. lilo it's simple to get text only. I like my runlevel 3. i like having the data for what's happening during the boot scroll by, not hidden. that way I know that everything has loaded right. ( not like ms world where it's mushroom treatment* as company policy. ) and manual start of a gui if it's wanted for the session.
though I agree, grub is now better supported than lilo, and is definately more commonly used as the default by distro's.
* mushroom treatment = keep you in the dark and feed you bullsh|t.
not fedora, it was actually a mandrake release, grub only had graphic interface options. ( they default to graphic with lilo as well but allow for text interface with lilo ) I refuse to use red hat's products, since 14 installs to get mountable root partition, then it went and defaulted to runlevel 5 when told to use 3. won't install red hat's products on my machines at all.
fdisk didn't set partition structure up correctly, for red hat.
but that's the rub, when you tell it to default to 3, it had better default to 3 or it gets removed and the company will never sell me thier product again.
even though mandriva likes gui and graphic feature in console, they don't stop you from saying no to all of it when configuring.
grub is gradually replacing lilo and grub tends to be somewhat easier to administer and is being shipped with new distributions such as Red Hat's Fedora Core 4. Although i have worked on lilo for quite some time with no drawbacks, I tend to stick to grub nowadays.
As others have already said both LILO and GRUB work. The conclusion that nobody has stated is that you may as well use whatever your distro defaults to using.
Or you could use loadlin.exe. I used to use that back in my Slackware days when the Linux kernel was at v1.4. The nice thing about loadlin.exe is that it doesn't mess with the MBR at all. The downside is that nobody uses it any longer. Even I only mention it as a humorous diversion although it is still as viable as any other boot loader.
I now use GRUB but I wouldn't say that any boot loader is superior to any other. If I installed a distro that defaulted to using LILO then I would use LILO for that machine.
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Grub Vs. LILO