How to install and boot 145 operating systems in a PC

[saikee]

lostinbravenet,

Welcome to Justlinux!

Lilo uses a static boot screen so the label length is restricted and the maximum number of entries on can fill up one screen is 27 imgaes. Lilo actually warns you if you submit more than that.

The killer in Lilo is that it checks every system validity before accepting a change in the lilo.conf, otherwise it just uses the old copy. Thus if you alter any other system's boot loader Lilo may object to it because its complied lilo.conf differs slightly. Therefore the maintenance work using lilo to boot a large number of systems can become burdensome.

As we can do relays in booting so potentially one can pick 12 distros loaded with Lilo for booting the above 145 systems. I estimate using Lilo requires 3 to 5 times more work.

As an example to show the advantage of Grub over Lilo, in Post #33 I list out menulin.lst showing all the Linux being booted but the choices for partitions hdd10 to hdd48 are currently empty. However the booting instructions are already there.

As soon as I install an OS in say hdd10 by instructing the installer to place its boot loader in the root partition, which is in the boot sector of hhd10, then the booting choice for partition hdd10 will fire up the Linux, without amendment needed.

Every Linux that is booted by Lilo can also be booted by Grub and vice versa.

Another very important feature of Grub is it can boot any system "manually". This implies a user can test every Grub command individually before putting it into the script file menu.lst.

For Linux Grub can boot any distro even without a boot loader installed!

I use both boot loaders but I have to say Lilo needs a lot more work to do the same thing.