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As a reluctant admin for a half dozen odd home and work systems, and having just dealt with a few clean reinstalls, the /etc/motd issue bit me too. It also remi
by kevhito 10y ago
As a reluctant admin for a half dozen odd home and work systems, and having just dealt with a few clean reinstalls, the /etc/motd issue bit me too. It also reminded me a bit of the horror that grub configuration has become.
When I started years ago there was LILO. It had quirks and was a pain to configure. Then grub came along and it had some great new features -- edit the easy-to-understand config file, and changes would automatically take effect. Easy background images. Easy menu building in the config file. Grub understood enough of the filesystem to avoid the LILO cruft.
Now there seems to be about 5 layers of indirection, autodetection, probing, and shell scripting hacks to generate scripts that will eventually spit out a mess of obfuscated grub config files, and god forbid you touch any of this mess because any changes you make will be overwritten (a) next boot, (b) next time the scripts decide to update the config, (c) next system update, or (d) just whenever. All of this dynamic stuff to configure something that, for many systems, needs a config change about zero times per year.
- adrianratnapala 10y agoI'm with you except that I never understood grub, not even when it was new and innocent. It's not even fair to say LILO was "a pain to configure". `lilo.conf` was pretty clear and straightforward. It's just that boot-loading is arcane and dangerous. This makes it possible to make your LILO screw-ups really simple and obvious. Which is much better than the kind of screw-ups you can make with GRUB.
- pjc50 10y agoWell, apart from the most common screwup: changing something and then not rerunning LILO.
- ars 10y agoI find grub incomprehensible so I still use lilo on my home computer. It works every single time without even one failure. On the other hand grub has failed me multiple times on the machines it's installed on. Grub has an overly complex config that you can't verify until you reboot and try it - if it fails you have a huge pain trying to get the exact right code to type in to make it work. Lilo on the other hand either works, or it tells you it didn't before you reboot, which makes it much more reliable. Lilo is better.
- gkya 10y agoI know nil about bootloaders, but about until 6 months ago, I used syslinux to load Arch for a bunch of years and it just worked (since then I departed for FreeBSD where you don't care about the brand of your bootloader). IDK if I ever saw the config file for that actually.
- zdkl 10y agosyslinux is awesome until you mismatch the booting media's version and the install version. Took me a while to track that one down.
- wazoox 10y agoI still have lilo on my slackware-based machine. And you know what, while I have countless troubles with grub (couldn't find the initrd, couldn't install itself to the MBR though it pretended there was absolutely no error, etc, etc), LILO never failed me: when you run "lilo" if it says "installed successfully", well at least it's installed.