(on Wikipedia)
https://www.joonet.de/lilo/ [ 1 ]

A boot loader, generally considered less used and less featureful than GRUB.

Although I had used LILO quite a lot in the past, and was doing some interesting things with it, like having multiboots with DOS and rearranging partitions to hide some or change what was primary, I tend to not use a bootloader like that anymore. I expect a distribution to be magical regarding a boot loader.

• LILO = Linux Loader

• When LILO breaks, I use boot-repair.

• See lilo.conf

-

• 2016-03-28 - 24.0, on Slackware 14.1
• 2010-07-20 - 22.8, on Unity Linux 2010 rc2
• 2009-04-08 - 22.6.1, probably on Unity Linux (version not recorded)

• I had used LILO in the distant past. Distant, like the 90s.

2016-03-28 - 24.0 ∞

• Comes installed with Slackware 14.1

The Slackware installer worked just fine, but LILO broke my bootup of Lubuntu.

I used boot-repair to fix things.

2010-07-20 - 22.8 ∞

• previously, I could use vga=324
• vga=0x31B = ?

• vga=0x376 = 1600x1200x32

2009-04-08 - 22.6.1 ∞

Advantages over GRUB

• Humans can install it
• Humans can maintain it

• Allows a higher resolution textmode

LILO textmode resolutions ∞

TODO: Elaborate on this..

The old LILO had this syntax:

vga=324
vga=791

The new LILO uses this syntax:

vga=0x31B
vga=0x376

Does 0x31B = 1920x1600x32 ?

Manually installing LILO ∞

Here's the situation:

• Given a hard drive
• On which you want to have LILO working
• On which lives a Linux distribution

• But that Linux distribution does not have lilo

... how do you get LILO working?

1. Get a Linux LiveCD which has LILO. I used RIPLinux 64-bit non-X.
2. Boot from that LiveCD
3. Prepare LILO
4. Set up an environment on which your existing distribution can be chrooted into
5. Send lilo.conf and lilo to that environment
6. chroot in

7. Run LILO

I have not experimented with bootable USB sticks. That would be a better thing to do.

d=sdb6
\echo
\echo " # setup.."
\echo
\mkdir -p /mnt/$d
\echo "   dev"
\mount /dev/$d /mnt/$d
\echo "   proc"
\mount -t proc proc /mnt/$d/proc
\mount -o bind /dev /mnt/$d/dev

\cp --verbose ./lilo.conf /mnt/$d/etc
\cp --verbose /sbin/lilo /mnt/$d

\echo
\echo " # chrooting in.."
\echo
\chroot /mnt/$d /bin/sh
## This stuff can't be scripted.. so type it.
## Although I suppose I could create /mnt/$d/script.sh and do a
##   chroot /mnt/$d /script.sh
# \lilo -v

\echo
\echo " # Recovering from all of this.."
\echo
\umount /mnt/$d/proc
\umount /mnt/$d/dev
\umount /mnt/$d

Old notes ∞

Reinstallation ∞

I'm not exploring this issue right now.

https://web.archive.org/web/20140913153150/http://blog.tpa.me.uk/2009/09/29/re-installing-lilo-from-a-slackware-boot-cd/

something like:

\mkdir  /foo
\mount  /dev/sda1  /foo
\mount  --bind  /proc  /foo/proc
\mount  --bind  /sys  /foo/sys
\mount  --bind  /dev  /foo/dev
\chroot  /foo
\vi  /etc/lilo.conf
\lilo
\exit
\reboot

Last updated 2022-08-25 at 20:07:15

Footnotes