extlinux (was: Re: lilo removal in squeeze (or, "please test grub2"))
Daniel Baumann <daniel@debian.org> writes:
> as of current git, you can now use EXTLINUX_UPDATE=false in
> /etc/default/extlinux to prevent having update-extlinux do anything.
That's the single feature I misseded. Thanks.
Although it would be even better if it was possible to include some
fixed part in it, while keeping most of it auto updated. I tested the
extlinux package after reading about it yesterday, and the missing
feature that immediately hit me was the ability to use a serial console.
This is of course as easy as with sys-/pxe-/mem-linux: just add
"serial 0 9600 0" or something similar to the config file. But running
update-extlinux would remove it on every kernel upgrade. Anyway, I
understand that this issue is now solved.
It has puzzled me for a while that grub2 has been chosen over extlinux
as the default x86 bootloader, but didn't know until this discussion
came up that extlinux now was packaged separately from syslinux, with
the nice helper scripts. I guess we all know syslinux and pxelinux very
well from Linux installation procedures over the last 15 years (for
syslinux at least), and HPA has been an active upstream maintainer all
this time AFAIK. This makes me very confident in extlinux. While grub2
has already bitten me too much to be considered at all on the important
boxes...
Just comparing http://git.kernel.org/?p=boot/syslinux/syslinux.git with
http://bzr.savannah.gnu.org/r/grub/trunk/grub/ should IMHO give more
than enough information to choose extlinux over grub2....
Thanks a lot for packaging extlinux!
Bjørn
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