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Re: GRUB loading.. Welcome to GRUB! error: incompatible license Entering rescue mode..



On Sat, Mar 28, 2015 at 02:44:03PM -0700, David Christensen wrote:
> debian:
> 
> I did a fresh install of Debian using debian-7.6.0-i386-netinst.iso today.
> When I rebooted, I saw:
> 
>     GRUB loading..
>     Welcome to GRUB!
> 
>     error: incompatible license
>     Entering rescue mode..
>     grub rescue>
> 
> I figured that there was something incompatible between the older ISO and
> current files.
> 
> 
> So, I downloaded debian-7.8.0-i386-xfce-CD-1.iso and installed that.  When I
> rebooted, I saw:
> 
>     GRUB loading..
>     Welcome to GRUB!
> 
>     error: incompatible license
>     Entering rescue mode..
>     grub rescue>
> 
> 
> Any suggestions?

I couldn't find anything immediately helpful on the web so I downloaded
the source code for grub. Fortunately, there's only one instance of the
phrase "incompatible license" in there and it's in a small function
called "grub_dl_check_license". The purpose of this function is to
confirm that a module being loaded has a license of "GPLv3", "GPLv3+" or
"GPLv2+". If not, then it returns the above error. I'm not intimately
familiar with the GPL, but as GRUB is one of GNU's higher-visibility
projects, I imagine this is seen as a perfectly cromulent thing to do.

I would suggest raising a bug against grub with the output from
bootinfoscript[1] attached. This is the sort of thing that testing
should have picked up, but it's possible you're pulling in a module that
most people don't use and which has no license or something.

Another avenue of investigation might be to run something like:

  for module in /boot/grub/i386-pc/*.mod; do
    echo -n "$module: "
	strings $module | grep LICENS
  done

and look for anything unusual.

[1]: http://bootinfoscript.sourceforge.net/

> 
> 
> TIA,
> 
> David
> 
> 
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