grub2 impressions

[John G. Heim]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jason White" <jason at jasonjgw.net>
To: <speakup at braille.uwo.ca>
Sent: Friday, November 27, 2009 6:55 PM
Subject: Re: grub2 impressions


> Zachary Kline  <speakup at braille.uwo.ca> wrote:
>>A little experimenting has found an answer to the beep problem.  Similar
>>to what you would do in grub-legacy, put a ctrl+g bell character in the
>>possibly quoted name of a menuentry title, before the left brace.
>>I just did this for my ArchLinux entry, and it beeped the PC speaker
>>properly.
>
> Also, for the serial console:
> http://linux.xvx.cz/188/debian-with-grub2-and-serial-connection/
>
> This is for debian. On other distributions, the preferred approach may be 
> to
> edit grub.cfg directly.
>

I configured a serial console for grub2 on my debian system by editing 
/etc/default/grub and adding these lines:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="console=tty0 console=ttyS0,19200n8"
GRUB_TERMINAL=serial
GRUB_SERIAL_COMMAND="serial --speed=19200 --unit=0 --word=8 --parity=no --stop=1"

There was already a line specifying GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="". I 
commented that out. The other lines were not already specified in the 
default file installed by the debian grub2 package. You have to run 
update-grub after making these changes.

I also got a beep in a menu item by editing the /boot/grub/grub.conf file 
but I lost it when I ran update-grub. Clearly, on a debian system, editing 
grub.conf is not the way to go. It says so right in the file, in fact. On a 
debian system, grub.conf is generated from the files in /etc/grub.d/. But I 
don't know how to get a beep in there.

Actually, the files in /etc/grub.d/ are scripts. So you could probably add a 
script with a sed command in it to add a beep to the first menu item. But 
other than that, I don't see how to add a beep such that it won't be lost 
when you run update-grub. On the other hand, it's no different than it was 
with a menu.lst file.You'd lose your beep when you ran update-grub with 
legacy grub.