Re: gdm3 issue [boot loader digression]

[Neal Murphy <neal.p.murphy@alum.wpi.edu>]

On Monday, December 09, 2013 06:06:24 AM Ralf Mardorf wrote:
> On Mon, 2013-12-09 at 15:15 +0530, Kailash Kalyani wrote:
> > The issue started when I removed old linux images from Ubuntu which is
> > on another partition. That resulted in a grub update from ubuntu and
> > since then I've had this issue.
> 
> So the answer already seems to be there. Ubuntu did likely automatically
> write a broken grub.cfg with what ever obscure boot option that does
> break to log in your Debian.
> 
> If possible you should use a good boot loader instead of GRUB, e.g.
> Syslinux. I use GRUB 2 just for fun too, but edit grub.cfg manually.
> 
> Use GRUB 2 from Debian, hopefully it's defaults are more sane than those
> of *buntus and automatically generate a saner grub.cfg.

Syslinux is nice, but it has its own problems and limitations. I couldn't get 
it to work on ISO installer, ISO converted-to-flash install and the system 
runtime.

Grub 2 is, as far as I know, still broken. I once spent 2-3 weeks trying to 
change my firewall system from isolinux/lilo/grub to grub2 for all booting. I 
couldn't get it to work on ISO and it simply refused to install on the disk I 
told it to (it always used the first disk it found that had some form of grub2 
on it).

I finally quit and went back to grub legacy with all of redhat's patches. I 
had it re-integrated and running in about a half hour: booting the ISO and the 
ISO equivalent on flash/rotating drives--which entails copying the tree from 
the ISO, changing '(cd)' to '(hd0,0)' in the config file(s), and installing 
grub in the boot loader--and booting the runtime system. The firewall system 
now has a consistent boot presentation. Since then, I've fixed a few bugs in 
it; it now displays background images very nicely, handles multiple linked 
config files, works very well on serial consoles, and the 'hit a key to 
continue' works reliably to select the serial or VESA console when it finds 
both.

My tuppence.