grub2 impressions

[John G. Heim]

I manage an installation of hundreds of dual boot machines and let me tell 
you, that beep is pretty nice. It might annoy the end users a little bit but 
if I have to reboot their machine, that beep comes in pretty handy.


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Zachary Kline" <kline.zachary at gmail.com>
To: <speakup at braille.uwo.ca>
Sent: Friday, November 27, 2009 6:14 PM
Subject: grub2 impressions


> 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.
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