262 Part III (Web server address) . Choosing and Installing a
262 Part III . Choosing and Installing a Linux Distribution Although people who use Linux systems casually rarely see a need for lots of partitions, those who maintain and occasionally have to recover large systems are thankful when the system they need to fix has several partitions. Multiple partitions can localize deliberate damage (such as denial-of-service attacks), problems from errant users, and accidental file system corruption. Using LILO or GRUB Boot Loaders A boot loader lets you choose when and how to boot the bootable operating systems installed on your computer s hard disks. Most Linux systems give you the opportunity to use GRUB or LILO boot loaders. 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 is called the GRand Unified Boot loader (GRUB). GRUB is a GNU bootloader (www.gnu.org/software/grub) that replaced the LILO as the default boot loader in many Linux systems (including Fedora). GRUB offers the following features: . Support for multiple executable formats. . Support for multiboot operating systems (such as Fedora, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and other Linux systems). . Support for non-multiboot 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. . Support for automatic decompression of boot images. . Support for downloading boot images from a network. For more information on how GRUB works, type man grub or info grub. The info command contains more details about GRUB. Booting with GRUB When you install Linux, you are typically given the option to configure the information needed to boot your computer (with one or more operating systems) into the
Check Tomcat Web Hosting services for best quality webspace to host your web application.