F10 rpm of grub2 completely broken

Tom H tomh0665 at gmail.com
Mon Dec 14 23:17:23 UTC 2009


>>None of this has anything to do with you trying an optional boot loader in
>>Fedora 10 more than a year after it had been published and requesting a
>>fix "asap". Perhaps that package has never worked for Fedora 10. Perhaps
>>it has not been tested by any substantial number of people even after its
>>release in Fedora 10, because if the primary [legacy] GRUB still does its
>>job, there is not much incentive to try the development version before it
>>will become the distribution's primary choice, too.

> The boot loader got involved because the *buntu derivatives are all using
> grub2 now, and I don't care what the call it "update-grub" or "grub-
> mkconfig", its broken, the whole design premise of an automatic grub
> configuration tool that they started with at gnu.org is broken. I now know
> enough about grub2 that I can hand carve a boot stanza for it that works just
> fine, so that point is also moot. What will really burn my ass is the first
> time I let a package manager update a kernel, and it fires off that steaming
> pile of crap and overwrites my hand carved grub.cfg so I can't boot any
> distro but the one that was running when the kernel was updated. Until I get
> around to carving a grub-mkconfig that actually works, I will cheerfully nuke
> it from all installs by hand just to protect myself.

> If you want to file a bz on it, be my guest, the problems are at least 2
> fold.

> 1, The gnu.org version calls all boots for all distro's "GNU/Linux', so you
> have lost the identifier in the title/menuentry lines that tells you what
> distro this stanza will boot. RMS's politics have no place in this and
> should be forthwith removed by copying the title line from the old grub.conf.

> 2. It only scans the /boot partition of the distro its booted to, a major
> fsckup right there. Grub/grub2 is capable of booting any bootable partition
> that exists in the machine. But why, if they are going to give us this
> 'tool', doesn't it take say a list of bootable partitions in the form of the
> device.map file, but with the numbered partition, in my case (hd0,1), (hd1,1)
> and (hd3,1) which all contain bootable distributions as well, call it
> /boot/grub/boot.map. It would be far better designed to just translate an
> existing grub.conf to fix the new base 1 numbering (that I didn't understand
> in one of my previous rants) that grub 2 now uses as the partition address,
> then just copy the rest of the stanza verbatum etc etc. Wrap it in the {},
> write it and go on till that grub.conf is out of entries, then goto the next
> (hd1,1), find that grub.conf and repeat till its out of bootable partitions
> in the "boot.map".

> That isn't rocket science. Its pure bash.

I suspect that Ubuntu 9.10 has defaulted to grub2 possibly prematurely
because it wants to iron out the bugs before it releases its next LTS
version in April.

Using a year-old release of grub2 is courageous at best because even
the grub2 versions "bundled" in the alpha and beta releases of Ubuntu
in September-November were misbehaving regularly.

If you do not want to use grub-mkconfig, you can write your own
config. The grub2 configuration file is not rocket science - and the
Ubuntu, Kubuntu, and Arch wikis and help pages now have good
documentation. Basically:

title --> menuentry{ ... }
sda1=(hd0,0) --> sda1=(hd0,1)
kernel --> linux

The root and initrd invocations are the same in grub.cfg as in
grub.conf/menu.lst (but "root" is has a different effect at the grub2
cli compared to the grub1 cli).




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