From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98) People with multi boot OS systems are very unhappy when, after they install a new OS, they are default booted into the new OS and the present OS boot setups are overwritten. During a normal install the user should be able to select how to configure lilo (what will be the default boot OS or whether to install lilo at all or use a floppy boot instead). Even after I installed fisher I could not find any GUI to help me re-configure lilo. I had to manually edit the lilo.conf file. Redhat has done a great job making Linux easy to install, however, this is completely defeated when you force these lilo choices on a user and then make it difficult re-setup or reconfigure how to boot the various installed OSes. Take a look at Mandrake ... they do a much better job with this. Redhat needs to improve this very basic and extremely important part of the Linux OS install process. Otherwise you will discourage many of the people you would have otherwise attracted with your improved GUI install. Also, it would be very helpful if you saved the existing boot sector before the install and then made it easy for a user to recover the original after install (place a hint in an obvious place of how to recover the original boot setup). BTW what's with the hideous lilo boot screen ... the colors are so bright it nearly knocked me off my chair during my first re-boot. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. install fisher with workstation defaults 2. 3. Actual Results: 1. your boot sector is overwritten without warning. 2. you have no easy way to recover. Expected Results: At least a warning that this will occur
Also see discussion on Kernel Trafic; http://kt.linuxcare.com/kernel-traffic/latest.epl
The workstation install is a simplified method to install a system which automatically fills in several steps. If you had run a Custom install you would have been prompted about LILO configuration. You can restore the MBR for most Microsoft OS's using the fdisk /mbr command. Finally, if you know of a multi-boot environment which the automatic LILO configuration the workstation class install used which did not do the right thing, please give us information so we can improve the method it uses.
It worked fine ... I just thought the users should be given an option, similar to the option to selecting the disk partitioning config. It is inconsistent to allow the user the option to select the hard drive partition config but not allow the user the option to select the boot time lilo config (in my mind a user will either default both or want to configure both). In any case, once you find out that you can't configure the boot using the Workstation install you've already installed Linux and are ready to reboot the installed system, as there is no warning. I really want a standard simple Workstation install and the option to configure the hard disk partitions and the boot configuration. I believe this is a common preference among your users. At a minimum it should be clear upfront that you requires a "custom" install if you want to configure the boot. However, please understand I DO NOT WANT A CUSTOM SOFTWARE INSTALL. I WANT A STANDARD SIMPLE WORKSTATION INSTALL WHERE I CAN CONFIGURE THE DISK PARTITION AND THE BOOT SETTINGS. These two items really don't have much in common with selecting a custom software configuration for Linux. They are more related to the network configuration, which BTW you also allow the user the option to choose during the Workstation install. Is there a GUI tool for helping to configuring Grub and/or Lilo in the Redhat distro after installation?
I don't know of a tool for post-install configuration of the boot loader of your choice (grub or lilo). I would recommend looking on http://freshmeat.net, it is a good listing of available software for Linux. We are working on making the expert and novice versions of the installer more separate, instead of trying to fit both into one as we do now. Future versions will do this better. Marking as wontfix because we can't make these changes now.