>  Is there anyone who has made LILO boot NetBSD, without the benefit of
>  having any Linux partitions on the disk...

I have used LILO to boot NetBSD, back in the ancient of days when I had 
DOS, Linux and NetBSD all on one machine.  It worked fine.

The only problem with your setup would be that you could not modify the 
LILO settings without booting Linux on the system.  I have no idea how 
hard it would be to port LILO to NetBSD.

What's so bad about selecting the boot partition with a function key?

 - irving -