Red Hat's Plymouth Sees New Activity

[Louise]

michael confused this. plymouth is not a boot loader, but a boot splash screen. You still need grub. But your efforts were still senseless, since ubuntu karmic+ will use grub2, and the other distributions will likely follow

HA! And I fell for it

Glad that GRUB won't be replaced anytime soon.

I am actually just reading about MBR, because I REALLY would like to know why the BIOS is needed to write a MBR.

Bootstrapping operating systems, after the computer's BIOS passes execution to machine code instructions contained within the MBR.

But why is this needed for virtual bootable disks??? A Virtual Machine doesn't have a BIOS.


Apparently harddisks can not exceed 2TiB!

Because the block size is 512 bytes, this implies that neither the maximum size of a partition nor the maximum start address (both in bytes) can exceed 232 ? 512 bytes, or 2 TiB. Alleviating this capacity limitation is one of the prime motivations for the development of the GUID Partition Table (GPT).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_boot_record

So GUID Partition Table is going to be really interesting to follow!!!

[madman2k]

michael confused this. plymouth is not a boot loader, but a boot splash screen. You still need grub. But your efforts were still senseless, since ubuntu karmic+ will use grub2, and the other distributions will likely follow

[Louise]

Argh... And I just figured out how to install GRUB on a clean virtual disk

kpartx -l imagefile
kpartx -a imagefile

mount /dev/mapper/loop0pX /mnt/tmp -o loop,rw # replace X with part. nr

chroot /mnt/tmp

#get device type (e.g. hda or sda)
df -h
  # look also at "boot=" in /etc/grub.conf

grub-install --recheck --root-directory=/ /dev/sda

umount /mnt/tmp
kpartx -d imagefile

I have never understood why LILO and GRUB have to probe the BIOS just to install a boot loader. And why does it also have to do it for a virtual disk that is mounted?

Maybe Plymouth will clean this up?

[madman2k]

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Red Hat's Plymouth Sees New Activity

Plymouth, the Red Hat graphical boot loader replacement that leverages kernel mode-setting to provide a clean and flicker-free boot experience, is in the process of receiving a number of new updates. Plymouth right now is largely just used by Fedora, but it's been picked up for Mandriva 2010, and Canonical was going to switch to it in Ubuntu 9.10, but that decision was retracted...

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