Re: Alternatives to grub and lilo? was grub2 menu problems
On Wed, Apr 23, 2014 at 12:18 PM, Steve Litt <slitt@troubleshooters.com> wrote:
>
> Grub used to be good software. Predictable, non-surprising, one config
> file you edited with an editor. Those days are gone.
>
> Now, with grub 2, I need to be an expert on seven or so files that get
> processed into one big one, which acts as the config. I don't mind
> acquiring expertise for something important like LaTeX for writing
> books or Python for making my computer do my bidding, but I don't want
> to spend hours or days gaining expertise just for a program telling the
> computer the kernel and initrd locations, and a few other things. With
> gui, splash screens, frame-buffers, and all sorts of other gobblty-gook.
>
> I considered going back to LILO, but it still has no understanding of
> filesystems: It's easy to bork and hard to fix. Not as hard as Grub 2
> though.
>
> Is there a simpler bootloader that works with Linux? I don't want GUI.
> I don't want a framebuffer. I don't want a splash screen. And I don't
> want to wade through seven files to turn those things off. Basically,
> I'd like something like LILO that understands ext4.
You don't need to understand all of grub's files in order to use it.
You just have to set the options that you want in "/etc/default/grub"
and run "update-grub".
If you want to create a hand-crafted menu entry, you can edit
"/etc/grub.d/40_custom".
And that's it.
If the above isn't allowing you to boot, then file a bug report.
The splash screen isn't a function of the bootloader but of the kernel cmdline.
Try "GRUB_TERMINAL="console" and "GRUB_GFXPAYLOAD_LINUX="text" in
"/etc/default/grub" for a text console.
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