Re: GRUB for Debian in general?
At 00:25 +0100 1999-01-05, Marcus Brinkmann wrote:
I think when the grubinst programm works reliable, we can offer the GRUB as
a real alternative in the Debian installation progress (on the boot disks).
s/works reliable/works at all/
As I said, the current grubinst works only with grub 0.4, and grub
0.5 is a vast improvement on 0.4 (among other things it brings grub
up to full feature parity with lilo with regard to Linux).
Because this affects directly the core Debian installation, this is
something which will not be done lightly. OTOH, if LILO can't boot the Hurd,
there are good chances that GRUB will replace LILO in the long run
(especially because it has a MUCH nicer user interface, I would really like
to have it the default).
LILO definitely can't handle the needs of a Mach-based system, and
GRUB already does everything LILO does and more. The only missing
piece is an install program like LILO's bootstrap installer (i.e. the
`lilo' program (which we almost have in grubinst)).
However, GRUB needs to be ported to the other ports, too. Is there a GRUB
version for alpha, sparc, m68k etc?
GRUB is not designed to be portable as far as I know, and the other
ports already have decent bootloaders. The boot-floppies already have
to deal with different bootloaders on different ports anyway.
PS: Maybe we need to change the partition naming in GRUB, or offer
alternatives, otherwise it is too confusing. Well, if we wrap around it in
grubinst, that's okay I think.
GRUB's partition naming makes sense if you get used to it, all it
gets from the BIOS is the disk number, so it has no idea what kind of
hard disk it's looking at, so presenting them all as hdX makes sense
(it gets really perverse when you note that the order in which the
BIOS presents the disks depends on the configuration of the BIOS).
And as for partitions, there is no way around the fact that BSD
partitions are different than standard PC partitions, GRUB needs to
differentiate them somehow. Again, there is some perversity in that a
set of BSD partitions can be inside a single PC partition.
--
Joel Klecker (aka Espy) <URL:http://web.espy.org/>
<URL:mailto:jk@espy.org> <URL:mailto:espy@debian.org>
Debian GNU/Linux PowerPC -- <URL:http://www.debian.org/ports/powerpc/>
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