[PLUG] Re: Does FIPS work with Windows XP Pro?

Russell Senior seniorr at aracnet.com
Sun Mar 21 22:43:02 UTC 2004


>>>>> "Jeme" == Jeme A Brelin <jeme at brelin.net> writes:

Jeme> Haven't used grub yet... I'm wary, but not for expressable
Jeme> reasons.

Grub rocks.  Everything is determinable at boot time rather at the
last time you had the system running (and thus could re-run lilo).
You can start any kernel you have on your filesystem dynamically.  You
also don't get the "LI..."  messages.

LILO essentially "pre-cooks" your booting options.  When you run lilo
after modifying /etc/lilo.conf, you are writing a list of data block
addresses of your kernels, etc, to the second stage of the boot
loader.

Grub's second stage knows about various file systems and can read the
configuration files, kernels, initrd's etc at boot time.  If you screw
up booting from the harddisk somehow, you can build a simple Grub boot
floppy by dd'ing a couple of generic files onto the floppy and then
use any of the kernels already safely on the harddisk.  Much more
flexible.

For a nice explanation of how boot loaders work, see:

  <http://www.xs4all.nl/~lennartb/bootloaders/>

Grub does have some peculiarities, such as zero-based disk and
partition numbering, e.g. the first partition of the first disk is
called (hd0,0) in grub parlance.  This takes a little extra toll on
them arithmetic processing unit up there in the grey cells, but on
balance it seems worth the price.

I don't have _any_ LILO boxes anymore.  Grub is worth learning.

Not that I have an opinion or anything. ;-)

-- 
Russell Senior         ``I have nine fingers; you have ten.''
seniorr at aracnet.com




More information about the PLUG mailing list