grub2 impressions

grub2 impressions

[Zachary Kline]

Hi All,
I've just decided to take the plunge and switch my dual boot ArchLinux
system from using grub-legacy to grub2.  My initial impressions are
below, for what it's worth.  I should note here that I've never felt it
necesary to have grub beep at the boot menu or any other such feature.
I just set an infinite timeout and go.
Superficially, menu.lst has gone, replaced by grub.cfg.  The syntax of
device specifications has been made a bit irregular.  Disks are still
numbered at 0, partitions are numbered at 1.  One wonders if the
developers plan on regularizing the disk numbers at some point?  So,
for instance, /dev/sda1 is (hd0,1) and sda5 is (hd0,5).
That aside, the command syntax is different.  You'll be using set a lot,
to change variables like your timeout or the default menu entry.  "set
timeout=0", for instance.  Menu entries are defined by blocks enclosed
in braces, instead of the title keyword.
menuentry "Arch Linux" {
set root=(hd0,5)
linux /boot/vmlinuz26 root=/dev/sda5 ro
initrd /boot/kernel26.img
}
This is the entry I use to boot ArchLinux over here.  I still need to
figure out how to get that to use uuids, but for now this certainly does
the job.
The documentation provided with my ArchLinux package of 1.97.1 is
incomplete.  There's a skeleton info menu with a few introductory nodes
already filled in, but it leaves a lot to be desired.  Nevertheless,
there's a sample configuration file included (at least in my package).
Overall, I'm happy I switched.  I'm sure the system will be going
through some pollishing before it's officially bug free (TM), butoverall
I like being on the leading edge when it comes to these things.  I
quibble with the developers to an extent over minor cosmetic issues, but
that's neither here nor there.  I hope this helps anyone who might want
to give this a try.
All the best,
Zack.

Re: grub2 impressions

[John G. Heim]

I manage an installation of hundreds of dual boot machines and let me tell 
you, that beep is pretty nice. It might annoy the end users a little bit but 
if I have to reboot their machine, that beep comes in pretty handy.


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Zachary Kline" <kline.zachary@gmail.com>
To: <speakup@braille.uwo.ca>
Sent: Friday, November 27, 2009 6:14 PM
Subject: grub2 impressions


> Hi All,
> I've just decided to take the plunge and switch my dual boot ArchLinux
> system from using grub-legacy to grub2.  My initial impressions are
> below, for what it's worth.  I should note here that I've never felt it
> necesary to have grub beep at the boot menu or any other such feature.
> I just set an infinite timeout and go.
> Superficially, menu.lst has gone, replaced by grub.cfg.  The syntax of
> device specifications has been made a bit irregular.  Disks are still
> numbered at 0, partitions are numbered at 1.  One wonders if the
> developers plan on regularizing the disk numbers at some point?  So,
> for instance, /dev/sda1 is (hd0,1) and sda5 is (hd0,5).
> That aside, the command syntax is different.  You'll be using set a lot,
> to change variables like your timeout or the default menu entry.  "set
> timeout=0", for instance.  Menu entries are defined by blocks enclosed
> in braces, instead of the title keyword.
> menuentry "Arch Linux" {
> set root=(hd0,5)
> linux /boot/vmlinuz26 root=/dev/sda5 ro
> initrd /boot/kernel26.img
> }
> This is the entry I use to boot ArchLinux over here.  I still need to
> figure out how to get that to use uuids, but for now this certainly does
> the job.
> The documentation provided with my ArchLinux package of 1.97.1 is
> incomplete.  There's a skeleton info menu with a few introductory nodes
> already filled in, but it leaves a lot to be desired.  Nevertheless,
> there's a sample configuration file included (at least in my package).
> Overall, I'm happy I switched.  I'm sure the system will be going
> through some pollishing before it's officially bug free (TM), butoverall
> I like being on the leading edge when it comes to these things.  I
> quibble with the developers to an extent over minor cosmetic issues, but
> that's neither here nor there.  I hope this helps anyone who might want
> to give this a try.
> All the best,
> Zack.
> _______________________________________________
> Speakup mailing list
> Speakup@braille.uwo.ca
> http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup
>
> 

Re: grub2 impressions

[Zachary Kline]

Hi John,
A little experimenting has found an answer to the beep problem.  Similar
to what you would do in grub-legacy, put a ctrl+g bell character in the
possibly quoted name of a menuentry title, before the left brace.
I just did this for my ArchLinux entry, and it beeped the PC speaker
properly.
Hope this helps,
Zack.
On Fri, Nov 27, 2009 at 06:33:25PM -0600, John G. Heim wrote:
> I manage an installation of hundreds of dual boot machines and let
> me tell you, that beep is pretty nice. It might annoy the end users
> a little bit but if I have to reboot their machine, that beep comes
> in pretty handy.
> 

Re: grub2 impressions

[Jason White]

Zachary Kline  <speakup@braille.uwo.ca> wrote:
>A little experimenting has found an answer to the beep problem.  Similar
>to what you would do in grub-legacy, put a ctrl+g bell character in the
>possibly quoted name of a menuentry title, before the left brace.
>I just did this for my ArchLinux entry, and it beeped the PC speaker
>properly.

Also, for the serial console:
http://linux.xvx.cz/188/debian-with-grub2-and-serial-connection/

This is for debian. On other distributions, the preferred approach may be to
edit grub.cfg directly.

Note: I haven't tested this. Only one of my machines has a serial port and
it's occupied by a Dectalk Express synthesizer. I have a USB->serial adapter
but that won't help here, since the kernel needs to be loaded for USB devices
to be recognized.

The real solution is called coreboot, and htere's also IPMI 2.0.

Just an aside on the XFS file system bug: the symptom was that grub-install
failed, but with a little work you could install grub manually from the Grub
shell. It was a longstanding bug in debian and elsewhere.

Grub 2 doesn't try to write to the file system via the block device, and so is
much better behaved in this area.

Re: grub2 impressions

[Steve Holmes]

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Hash: RIPEMD160

Hey Zack, Thanks for the encouraging words.  I also am an Arch user
and took the chance tonight.  In case you didn't pick up on it, the
arch folks have a nice write-up in their wiki at
http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GRUB2
where a lot of warm-up instructions are available.  It made me feel
more comfortable with going for it.  As it is, I had one goof where my
box would not boot.  I had to use Chris's talking install disk to boot
my machine and correct the grub.cfg file.  The default values do not
include /boot in front of the kernal image nor the initram image.
After fixing that, I'm all good now.
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Re: grub2 impressions

[John G. Heim]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jason White" <jason@jasonjgw.net>
To: <speakup@braille.uwo.ca>
Sent: Friday, November 27, 2009 6:55 PM
Subject: Re: grub2 impressions


> Zachary Kline  <speakup@braille.uwo.ca> wrote:
>>A little experimenting has found an answer to the beep problem.  Similar
>>to what you would do in grub-legacy, put a ctrl+g bell character in the
>>possibly quoted name of a menuentry title, before the left brace.
>>I just did this for my ArchLinux entry, and it beeped the PC speaker
>>properly.
>
> Also, for the serial console:
> http://linux.xvx.cz/188/debian-with-grub2-and-serial-connection/
>
> This is for debian. On other distributions, the preferred approach may be 
> to
> edit grub.cfg directly.
>

I configured a serial console for grub2 on my debian system by editing 
/etc/default/grub and adding these lines:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="console=tty0 console=ttyS0,19200n8"
GRUB_TERMINAL=serial
GRUB_SERIAL_COMMAND="serial --speed=19200 --unit=0 --word=8 --parity=no --stop=1"

There was already a line specifying GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="". I 
commented that out. The other lines were not already specified in the 
default file installed by the debian grub2 package. You have to run 
update-grub after making these changes.

I also got a beep in a menu item by editing the /boot/grub/grub.conf file 
but I lost it when I ran update-grub. Clearly, on a debian system, editing 
grub.conf is not the way to go. It says so right in the file, in fact. On a 
debian system, grub.conf is generated from the files in /etc/grub.d/. But I 
don't know how to get a beep in there.

Actually, the files in /etc/grub.d/ are scripts. So you could probably add a 
script with a sed command in it to add a beep to the first menu item. But 
other than that, I don't see how to add a beep such that it won't be lost 
when you run update-grub. On the other hand, it's no different than it was 
with a menu.lst file.You'd lose your beep when you ran update-grub with 
legacy grub.

Re: grub2 impressions

[Kirk Reiser]

I'm not sure if the feature will continue but I found that when
installing grub2 the update-grub script in debian still converted a
menu.lst file into the appropriate grub.cfg.  Whether it continues to
do so or not only the debian packager's can say but it works currently
anyway.


--
Kirk Reiser				The Computer Braille Facility
e-mail: kirk@braille.uwo.ca		University of Western Ontario
phone: (519) 661-3061