The following sections describe both GRUB and LILO boot loaders.
Booting Your Computer with GRUB
With multiple operating systems installed and several partitions set up, how does your computer
know which operating system to start? To select and manage which partition is booted and how it
is booted, you need a boot loader. The boot loader that is installed by default with Fedora and
other Linux systems is the GRand Unified Boot loader (GRUB).
GRUB is a GNU bootloader (www.gnu.org/software/grub) that replaced LILO as the default
boot loader in many Linux systems, including Fedora and Ubuntu. GRUB offers the following
features:
Support for multiple executable formats.
Support for multi-boot operating systems (such as Fedora, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD,
and other Linux systems).
Support for non??“multi-boot operating systems (such as Windows 95, Windows 98,
Windows NT, Windows ME, Windows XP, and OS/2) via a chain-loading function.
Chain-loading is the act of loading another boot loader (presumably one that is specific
to the proprietary operating system) from GRUB to start the selected operating system.
Support for multiple file system types.
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Installing Linux 7
Support for automatic decompression of boot images.
Support for downloading boot images from a network.
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