MEPIS Community Forum

I installed Squeeze and Wheezy grub2 to their root partitions without any problems, and continued using legacy grub. Maybe there's just a glitch in the M12 alpha installer?


I suspect we'll have an answer eventually.

Yeah, GRUB2 is pretty much a solution in search of a problem if you ask me. A boot loader should be a very simple thing, and even legacy GRUB is probably more complicated than it really needs to be. But GRUB2 takes complexity to a whole new level, and I just don't see the point of doing that. The fstab corruption issue can be easily fixed in a number of ways that don't require GRUB2.

Jerry mentions GRUB2 "not seeing" a second HDD, and that has me pretty worried because I happen to have two HDDs on my machine, a mixed SATA/IDE setup, which may prove to be "interesting" to say the least.

Having said that, I'm sure I'll find a way to work around GRUB2 somehow, even if I have to install a dedicated boot partition with legacy GRUB on it for booting into M12 by chain loading.

Around the net are a few Grub Editors that can be made to work in Debian, which take manual editing a thing of the distant past,
As for repairing Grub 2, which I have never had to do.
http://www.supergrubdisk.org/super-grub2-disk/
And Grub2 will see additional drives with no problems, using Debian Kubuntu and every Disro I have ever installed that uses Grub2

Read Danum's post.

Why Grub2?

You'll need to go all the way back to before 2002. Grub2 was initially announced over a decade ago. I'll link to the FSF's short FAQ though: http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/grub-faq.html



Basically, Grub had gotten to the same point of the KDE 3.x series. It was full of black-boxed undocumented code segments, a mess of hacks, and had been extended over and over again. Keep in mind, the FSF developers had already decided this before the first Mepis CD was ever released. Before the first Knoppix CD. Before most of us here probably ever touched a /Linux system at all, much less Ubuntu users.

On top of that, the Grub2 project itself was actually an adoption of another project; PUPA: http://web.archive.org/web/200806071159 ... -2.en.html



Also, good luck actually finding the discussions that lead up to the adoption of PUPA and the conclusion that Grub Legacy needed to be replaced. FSF's own developer mailing list archive dates back to 2004: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/grub-devel/

However, much like KDE4 versus KDE3, non-developers only look at how the software worked for them, and not the tech or code behind the software. E.G. the guys still trying to push Trinity even though the actual guys who wrote KDE 3.x said it wasn't worth the time or trouble to try and maintain.

Did Grub-Legacy need to replaced?

Well, with the move to UEFI, yes, it did.

Was Grub2 ready to replace Grub-Legacy?

From a code standpoint... yes.

From a user standpoint? No.

Thanks, Danum.

That's a possibility. I think it's a bit premature to be considering bailing out on Grub2 with this being the just 1st alpha release.



The grub legacy feature that I miss is the editable line at the bottom of the grub screen that allows you to easily change the kernel options line. You can edit a grub2 stanza at the grub screen but that single line editor is a lot easier.

I think the grub editors you mention only run while at the desktop.

So in my case, I will be replacing M11 with M12 and installing grub2 to MBR. The other distros across two hard drives have grub2 or grub-legacy installed to their respective / partitions. Shouldn't be a problem, right?

Like I said, I did the same thing on my notebook, except replacing M11 with Squeeze, and except there's only one hard drive there. It worked fine, never had to edit any files, piece of cake so far. That was back in mid-May.

No, I'm not irreversibly dead set against it. I've already made the decision to go ahead and try it on my laptop. Who knows? I'm willing to become a convert. I just question the necessity and added complexity. Things are so easy with legacy grub.

It seems that the grub2 grub-install command requires a --force option to install to a partition instead of a mbr. However, for the purposes which most folks use grub installed to root, it would be probably be better for the installer to just populate the boot/grub tree and generate the core.img file which then could be chainloaded to from either legacy grub or grub2. That's because using the --force option can cause boot failures later on if the user moves partitions around making the grub's blocklists point to an invalid location.

I strongly suspect Warren has a better grasp of grub2 than I and will be able to fix the installer without too much trouble.