On Wed, Oct 30, 2013 at 04:58:13PM +0100, berenger.morel@neutralite.org wrote:
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>
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> >
> >Don't know if I'd call Grub2 bloated, but Grub-legacy was friendlier.
>
> In my own and humble opinion, and for my needs, it is.
> I do not hate grub, since when you do not have complex needs it
> works out of the box, and maintains itself (in fact, not really
> itself, it's os-prober plus some dpkg hooks which maintains it),
> unlike Lilo for the last point (which does not have the required
> hooks).
> But when you need to take control on your boot loader, Lilo is
> better, because you have less things to bother with, and I only say
> that because I tried to use both grub1 and grub2 (it was the
> transition, which did not helped my mind). Lilo was really damn easy
> to configure, and worked in 5 minutes, maybe less.
> I also had problems at installation time with grub on some
> installations (it refuses to installs itself, for obscure reasons,
> leading to unusable system), and lilo had none.
>
> Grub is able to read a configuration file when it runs, this is why
> there is no need ( or at least, there were ) to run a tool to update
> it (lilo reinstalls itself on boot sector everytime you run #lilo).
> But I think it was in the old grub1, now you need to run something
> like #update-grub to update the configuration file (???), so the
> strong point of grub is no longer a strong point.
Actually, just to clarify something there. You don't NEED to run the
update-grub script. As I understand it, LILO boots by jumping execution
to a defined point on the disk (the start of the kernel). When you
install a new kernel, you have to tell LILO where to find the new file.
For grub2, most of what "update-grub" is doing is parsing the kernel
version and adding it to the menu.
In both situations, it's possible to use /vmlinuz and /vmlinuz.old
symlinks and have "Linux" and "Old Linux" menu entries. When you install
a new kernel, you point /vmlinuz at it and /vmlinuz.old at the previous
kernel. Then, without changing either boot loader, the new kernel will
be loaded.
Where Grub shines, though, is if you want to (or have to) move
partitions around. Say you need a larger swap partition, so you expand
/dev/sda1 (swap) and shrink /dev/sda2 (root). In shrinking /dev/sda2,
all your data moves across the disk. Now you need to re-run LILO to find
the kernel again. But because GRUB actually understands the partition
table and filesystem, it's able to see where the file has moved to and
can boot without effort.
> It also includes a "shell", to tune your booting options before
> booting. This might be useful for 2 situations I can see: booting on
> a guest HD (but for that, the easier is to install a boot loader on
> the guest HD itself), or fixing errors (and in such situation, I
> prefer to simply boot on the old kernel, with it's old options, and
> then fix the errors definitely, instead of playing with things
> without auto-completion or any warning from the system).
>
> Those "features" are very rarely useful, if useful at all (the shell
> is almost unusable for people who do not know the american qwerty
> layout, for example), so I name it bloated.
Actually, it's possible to remap keys in the shell. I used to use a
dvorak keyboard with grub quite happily.
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