New GRUB2 Build Brings Official Release Closer

[phoronix]

Phoronix: New GRUB2 Build Brings Official Release Closer

After being in development for many years, GRUB 1.97 was released this past October as a major development release towards GRUB 2.0. GRUB 2.0 brings forth many new features and has already been picked up by Ubuntu and other Linux distributions...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=NzkyMA

[arjan_intel]

grub2 vs syslinux

Interesting to see what various distributions will pick in the next year or so; grub2 or syslinux.

Well, they already use syslinux for all their CD and live images, just wonder if they will extend that to their main OS as well.

For Moblin we're going to syslinux instead of grub2; syslinux has all the features we need, and it means we don't need 2 different bootloaders (with two different sets of bios interaction issues), but just one... if the installer works the OS boot will work and visa-versa...

[RealNC]

For Moblin we're going to syslinux instead of grub2; syslinux has all the features we need

Can syslinux boot Windows correctly? According to this:

http://syslinux.zytor.com/wiki/index.php/ISOLINUX

syslinux would have issues when users would want a dual boot machine.

[arjan_intel]

Can syslinux boot Windows correctly? According to this:

http://syslinux.zytor.com/wiki/index.php/ISOLINUX

syslinux would have issues when users would want a dual boot machine.

isolinux cannot reliably (isolinux is the cd booting part of syslinux, and this is an artifact of how "magic" cd booting is), but extlinux (the harddisk boot edition) can boot windows and anything else just fine.

[Kano]

I don't know where your problem is, you can certainly use chain.c32 to start the win bootloader. That's what i use for V/7 iso images to copy it onto usb stick (no win tool needed).

default chain.c32 ntldr=/bootmgr

Will boot it just fine.

[srg_13]

I think that most of the things that GRUB2 brings are pretty useless - things like internationalisation and really fancy themed menus, higher resolution text terminal, total modularity, etc...

To me, the Mac OS X bootloader is the perfect example of what a bootloader needs to be - first of all, it's completely invisible unless you need to choose a different OS than the default. To do that, you just hold option for a few seconds when it boots up and you get a blank grey screen with two or three logos on it - select one with the arrow keys and press enter and you're done...

All I want is a fairly simple multiboot compatible loader that supports the most common file systems and can boot 64 bit kernels without using the A.out kludge. Now, having dabbled with kernel development myself, I know that isn't easy, but it shouldn't take more than two years to get a stable release...