Gentoo Archives: gentoo-dev

From: Collins Richey <erichey2@××××.com>
To: gentoo-dev@××××××××××.org
Subject: Re: [gentoo-dev] Comments on the new "from source" (build) CD Installation page
Date: Mon, 03 Sep 2001 18:43:58
Message-Id: 20010903185533.0d0e36ab.erichey2@home.com
In Reply to: Re: [gentoo-dev] Comments on the new "from source" (build) CD Installation page by Daniel Robbins
1 On Mon, 3 Sep 2001 18:33:05 -0600 Daniel Robbins <drobbins@g.o>
2 wrote:
3
4 > On Mon, Sep 03, 2001 at 06:22:40PM +0700, Collins Richey wrote:
5 > > Congratulations on a fine document. I like the new style -
6 > finally a
7 > > date last updated!!!
8 > >
9 > > Having installed and worked with _rc5 and various other distros in
10 > the
11 > > past few months, I've come across one glitch in the otherwise
12 > letter
13 > > perfect installation process - the grub vs. lilo issue.
14 > >
15 > > I (and perhaps others in your audience) have a multi-boot machine.
16 > > I'm currently running from a jblinux distro while waiting for _rc6
17 > to
18 > > jell, although I still boot from _rc5 from time to time. jblinux
19 > is
20 > > probably the only distro to offer an XFS file system.
21 > Unfortunately
22 > > the good folks at grub have never heard of XFS, so lilo is the
23 > only
24 > > way to boot from an XFS partition. You should offer lilo as an
25 > > alternative, or at least warn people that it may not be a good
26 > thing
27 > > to write grub to their mbr, if they have other bootable distros to
28 > > worry about.
29 >
30 > As long as the *boot* partition isn't XFS, all should go well. The
31 > root
32 > partition should still be able to be XFS, since it is accessed
33 > directly
34 > by the kernel.
35 >
36
37 In my case it's both partitions. I'm always concerned when distros
38 cavalierly (IMHO) offer to put a boot loader in the mbr before it's
39 known that this will work. Alas, almost every distro does it this
40 way. At least on the jblinux distro (for example), I was able to
41 choose to write the lilo boot stuff to floppy.
42
43 I just think it would be worth at least a note in the install
44 document.
45
46 --
47 Collins Richey
48 Denver Area
49 jblinux 2.2 xfce sylpheed opera