On 05/19/18 19:40, William Pitcock wrote:
Hello,
On Sat, May 19, 2018 at 7:15 PM, A. Wilcox <awilfox(a)adelielinux.org> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> This is a notice to all Adélie Linux developers that we will be
> deprecating syslinux as of beta1, and it will not be shipping with 1.0.
>
> There are many reasons for this:
>
> * syslinux is not so maintained any more
>
> * syslinux does not work right on most (U)EFI machines, including actual
> Tiano machines, in addition to Apple machines
>
> * syslinux only boots x86 computers
>
> * GRUB 2 has better support for older BIOSes with finicky hard disk
> controllers / CD drives (for pmmx)
>
> * GRUB 2 is more customisable
>
> * GRUB 2 allows us to have actual menus on the boot CD, instead of
> potentially confusing "boot:" prompt or very limited syslinux menu.c32
>
> If someone is aware of a computer that is bootable on syslinux and not
> GRUB 2, please reply ASAP so that we can either debug it and fix GRUB 2,
> or review our other options for such computers. Thank you.
Should we push for this change to be in Alpine 3.9 too? My position
on extlinux was that it was mostly intended to be a replacement for
lilo.
William
As a replacement to lilo, syslinux excels. Simple configuration, sparse
prompt, small binary size, not maintained. ;)
I don't know if GRUB 2 matches very well with Alpine's goals. grub-bios
and syslinux have similar install sizes (both in the 4 MB range), but
grub's common package is 13 MB extra.
We're going with GRUB because it is user-friendly. I don't think
servers really need good support for 1990s BIOSes or VESA boot menus.
Best,
--arw
--
A. Wilcox (awilfox)
Project Lead, Adélie Linux
http://adelielinux.org