Baslinux mailing list

["David Moberg" <davidjmoberg AT gmail.com>]

sindi keesan wrote:

> Something easier than LILO would be nice as an add-on package.  How big is
> the LILO on the 2-floppy BL3.40?  How big is syslinux (which David used to
> set up a 1-floppy USB linux)?

GRUB:

# ls -l /boot/grub/stage2
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root       109792 Apr 30  2002 /boot/grub/stage2

syslinux:

# dd if=/dev/zero of=dosfs bs=1k count=1440
1440+0 records in
1440+0 records out
# mkdosfs dosfs
mkdosfs 2.8 (28 Feb 2001)
# cp dosfs dosfs_with_syslinux
# syslinux dosfs_with_syslinux
# cmp -l dosfs dosfs_with_syslinux | wc -l
   9294

Does anybody have a size estimate for lilo?

As you can see, syslinux is only 9k, compared with about 100k for
GRUB. syslinux also installs to a FAT filesystem, which has less
overhead than ext2 for a floppy-sized image. There is a variant of
syslinux that boots from ext2 instead, it's called extlinux.

David