grub2 impressions

[Zachary Kline]

Hi All,
I've just decided to take the plunge and switch my dual boot ArchLinux
system from using grub-legacy to grub2.  My initial impressions are
below, for what it's worth.  I should note here that I've never felt it
necesary to have grub beep at the boot menu or any other such feature.
I just set an infinite timeout and go.
Superficially, menu.lst has gone, replaced by grub.cfg.  The syntax of
device specifications has been made a bit irregular.  Disks are still
numbered at 0, partitions are numbered at 1.  One wonders if the
developers plan on regularizing the disk numbers at some point?  So,
for instance, /dev/sda1 is (hd0,1) and sda5 is (hd0,5).
That aside, the command syntax is different.  You'll be using set a lot,
to change variables like your timeout or the default menu entry.  "set
timeout=0", for instance.  Menu entries are defined by blocks enclosed
in braces, instead of the title keyword.
menuentry "Arch Linux" {
set root=(hd0,5)
linux /boot/vmlinuz26 root=/dev/sda5 ro
initrd /boot/kernel26.img
}
This is the entry I use to boot ArchLinux over here.  I still need to
figure out how to get that to use uuids, but for now this certainly does
the job.
The documentation provided with my ArchLinux package of 1.97.1 is
incomplete.  There's a skeleton info menu with a few introductory nodes
already filled in, but it leaves a lot to be desired.  Nevertheless,
there's a sample configuration file included (at least in my package).
Overall, I'm happy I switched.  I'm sure the system will be going
through some pollishing before it's officially bug free (TM), butoverall
I like being on the leading edge when it comes to these things.  I
quibble with the developers to an extent over minor cosmetic issues, but
that's neither here nor there.  I hope this helps anyone who might want
to give this a try.
All the best,
Zack.