LILO vs. GRUB
Two most popular boot loaders on linux systems are LILO and GRUB. If there are more then I dont know ;). First question is what is a boot loader ?
Boot loader loads the operating system to memory. When the system boots it reads the MBR(master boot record) of your system and You can store the boot record of only one operating system in a single MBR, so a problem becomes apparent when you require multiple operating systems. Hence the need for more flexible boot loaders and here comes LILO and GRUB in picture. Here are the main differences between these two.
- LILO has no interactive command interface, whereas GRUB does.
- LILO does not support booting from a network, whereas GRUB does.
- LILO stores information about the location of the kernel or other operating system on the Master Boot Record (MBR). Every time a new operating system or kernel is added to the system, the Stage 1 LILO bootloader has to be manually overwritten, otherwise there is no way to boot the new OS or kernel. This method is more risky than the method used by GRUB because a mis-configured LILO configuration file may leave the system unbootable (a popular way to fix this problem is to boot from Knoppix or another live CD, chroot into the partition with mis-configured lilo.conf and correct the problem). On the other hand, correcting a mis-configured GRUB is comparatively simple as GRUB will default to its command line interface where the user can boot the system manually. This flexibility is probably the main reason why many users nowadays prefer GRUB over LILO.