However, lilo is (or can be) notoriously difficult to set up with some hardware. This is not really the fault of lilo's authors, nor of linux. It is the failure of OEMs to agree upon and follow some more universal standards than merely those needed to get by with Microsoft operating systems. Because the BIOS is written to work hand in hand with Windows, not Linux, lilo sometimes has to make guesses. And sometimes those guesses aren't right. There are overrides to cover virtually everything, but unless you know in advance that they are needed for your hardware, you end up doing a lot of poking around to get it right.
I agree, this is not user friendly. Newer hardware is usually a lot more cooperative. But the "old" (as in more than 5 years ago) stuff can be a PITA. I know this, having installed Linux on a number of Compaq machines. It always works eventually...
It sounds like you're hitting a cylinder boundary limitation because this distro is partitioning the hard drive differently from other distros. This is usually worked around by having a small /boot partition at the beginning of the disk.
Actually, I think it's that the installer didn't copy the necessary initrd to the hard disk. So far, our efforts to get the thing running have assumed the initrd wasn't necessary. I now believe that it is, and copying it from the CD to the hard disk, then telling lilo to point the kernel at it, will fix the problem.
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However, lilo is (or can be) notoriously difficult to set up with some hardware. This is not really the fault of lilo's authors, nor of linux. It is the failure of OEMs to agree upon and follow some more universal standards than merely those needed to get by with Microsoft operating systems. Because the BIOS is written to work hand in hand with Windows, not Linux, lilo sometimes has to make guesses. And sometimes those guesses aren't right. There are overrides to cover virtually everything, but unless you know in advance that they are needed for your hardware, you end up doing a lot of poking around to get it right.
I agree, this is not user friendly. Newer hardware is usually a lot more cooperative. But the "old" (as in more than 5 years ago) stuff can be a PITA. I know this, having installed Linux on a number of Compaq machines. It always works eventually...
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I'm not ready to blame the hardware, having had no trouble with other distributions getting lilo installed on it.
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