LILO

LILO (LInux LOader) is a simple boot loader to load Linux and other operating systems.

Installation
LILO's installation is two-fold. One is the installation of the software itself on the system (but does not activate LILO), the second one is the installation (activation) of the LILO bootloader on the disk's MBR.

Emerge
The software installation will only deploy the software on the file system, but will not install LILO in the MBR.

Installing LILO on the MBR
In order to install LILO on the MBR or update LILO, invoke. However, before doing that, the file must be set up, which is covered in the Configuration section below.

Configuration
An example file is provided at. To start configuring LILO, copy over the example file.

Update the file accordingly.

General configuration
First configure LILO to be deployed on the system. The  parameter tells LILO where to install the LILO bootloader in. Usually, this is the block device that represents the first disk (the disk that the system will boot), such as. Be aware that the file still uses  so make sure that references to  are changed to.

Next, tell LILO what to boot as default (if the user does not select any other option at the boot menu). The name used here is the  value of the operating system blocks defined later in the file.

LILO will show the available options for a short while before continuing to boot the default selected operating system. How long it waits is defined by the  parameter and is measured in tenths of a second (so the value 10 is one second):

Configuring the Gentoo OS block
An example configuration block for Gentoo is shown below. It is given the "Gentoo" label to match the  parameter declared earlier.

This will boot the Linux kernel with root file system.

Adding kernel parameters
To add additional kernel parameters to the OS block, use the  parameter. For instance, to boot the Linux kernel silently (so it does not show any kernel messages unless critical):

systemd users for instance would want to set  so that the systemd init is used:

As can be seen, additional kernel parameters are just appended to the same  parameter.

Multiple block definitions
It is a good idea to keep old definitions available in case the new kernel doesn't boot successfully. This is accomplished by creating another block:

Updating LILO in the MBR
As mentioned earlier, has to be executed in order to install LILO in the MBR. This step has to be repeated every time is modified or when the Linux kernel(s) that the  file points to are updated!

Running too much doesn't hurt.

Dual boot Gentoo and FreeBSD
To dual boot Gentoo and FreeBSD, edit as follows:

Make sure to adapt the example configuration file to match the setup used.

Unmerge
Uninstall lilo, simply: