MEPIS Community Forum

BTW...the above deb and instructions worked fine on 64-bit.

Thanks for doing this, Danum.

-Paul C.

Danum has provided the how, can someone provide the why? Menu.lst is straightforward and easy to edit; grub.cfg is tortuous and darn near impossible.

Well, thats the cool thing about the editor.... it takes the pain out of editing grub2.

The answer to your first question, because Mepis 11.5 will use Grub2 the same as it will use UUID , if you do not like it contact the developer, all I do is try to educate people in the easy ways of doing things.
and anything is impossible if you have no desire to learn

Danum, does linux-base do enough to create correct and 100% Debian compliant fstab? linux-base is actually included in MEPIS11.
(dpkg-reconfigure linux-base)

I apologize because my question was misconstrued -- I have few problems with grub2, I use it in other distros. The difficulty arises when you have plug-in distros (external satas) and you have to figure out how to edit grub.cfg. I assume that when M11.5 is installed, grub2 will be installed as well. My question should have been, "Why convert to grub2 now, when grub legacy works perfectly well in M11?" Now when I have an MBR problem, it can be simply fixed with the Repair MBR function. If I changed to grub2, I anticipate that that capability would be lost. When's the scheduled release of M11.5?

Startup-manager will let you change the boot delay and do a few other simple tweaks in Grub2. But I can't wait for a full function GUI Grub2 editor

The reason I did not mention dpkg-reconfigure linux-base is although it will give you persistent naming, you could end up using udf instead of UUID, this seems to be down as to your computer, in a vbox, install it is correct fstab shows UUID, and with Mepis installed on a Toshiba laptop, it shows udf in fstab

Right, most of the problem you are having with Grub2 are, a lack of documentation for Grub2, in particular debian Grub2, even the Debian wiki is out of date. plus Debian Grub2 is different in some ways to say Kubuntu Grub2. an example of this is in the boot editor I posted, it is made for Kubuntu not Debian so if this were to be used by default in Mepis, it would need rebuilding so if at anytime Grub2 was updated you would keep your installed Grub2 background, and not go back to the debian default
Why convert to Grub2, Debian now defaults to using Grub2 along with UUID, if you install certain debs that is what they expect to find, because if they find grub-legacy there is no way you will boot, without doing some hacking,
A good example is installing dropbox on a legacy system, it expects the Debian default and because it cannot find it rewrites fstab, which means you as a user have to edit it to be able to boot.

Thanks for that, Danum - it's the first time I've seen an explanation of why Dropbox rewrites fstab. Now all I need to know is why the rewriting is not done if I opt not to us extended attributes.

Phil