Mageia 3 Released, Still Using Legacy GRUB

[timothyja]

You do realise your lack of humour...

No because it wasnt funny.

[Redi44]

lol

You do realise that this distro was started at the end of 2010.

You do realise your lack of humour...

[GreatEmerald]

What i truly, truly cannot stand about Mageia is the urpmi package manager. Rpmdrake always insists that it has to restart itself to resolve some updated dependencies so the GUI tool is out of the question. And urpmi is so inflexible with queries that if you don't have the full perfect package namestring to query it will always return nothing.

Yea, the GUI tool is kind of limited and slow. But for searching, you're doing it wrong, you are supposed to use urpmf: http://www.linuxcertif.com/man/8/urpmf/en/

[Grogan]

I agree that Grub2 can be hard to use, but I think that's the fault of distributions not making it possible to turn off the automatic grub.cfg generator script and allowing you to edit yourself. I've run Grub2 on Debian/Ubuntu and on Gentoo, and I think Grub2 is much less of a burden to use on Gentoo than on Debian/Ubuntu because it doesn't overwrite your configuration unless you tell it to.

Yes, that's nice and simple. Distros provide a bit of control, like parameters in files in "/etc/sysconfig" (or a particular distro's equivalent), but I can't be arsed editing files to get scripts to do the right thing. Might as well just edit grub.cfg if I have to do that.

I like your grub.cfg file. I suppose it's possible to just forgo the grub-mkconfig in those other distros and just edit it manually all the time. As long as you don't install any more distro kernel packages there shouldn't be anything that automatically runs grub-mkconfig anyway.

I have Grub 2 in Sabayon on my laptop, and once I built a kernel I just did manual edits since. (Sabayon, at least at the time of my install of the rolling release distro, has an absolutely retarded Grub autoconfig. It INSISTED on using that mount by UUID syntax, even for kernels without an initrd, not even using fstab for guidance. It also buries your custom kernel images in a separate "Advanced" menu. Therefore, I never want to run that again because it causes me to have to do serious editing each time, or the system won't even boot)

So yes, I suppose that I am directing my hate in the wrong place. It's how the distros are using the autoconfig scripting that gives me the pox.

[timothyja]

Mageia is so 2000

You do realise that this distro was started at the end of 2010.

[Sonadow]

Only the Live ISOs cannot use Grub2.

Grub2 is available as an option in the DVD installer version of Mageia 3:

One major bug still affects installation from any live iso. Workaround would be to install with grub and install grub2 after first boot.

Grub2 can now be selected during classic installer and may be installed to the MBR or, if a partition is selected then grub2's core.img (kernel) is written to /boot/grub2/i386-pc/core.img. This allows for multi-booting from either grub legacy or grub2. (see /usr/share/doc/grub2/README.Mageia. For chainloading it is possible to force the install to a partition boot sector with: grub2-install --force /dev/sdxy which uses blocklists, however this is NOT recommended.

Grub2 is now integrated into drakboot and the bootloader may be changed using this utility, however the menu cannot yet be customized from drakboot. There is a standalone utility in the repositories (grub-customizer), which may be used if it is felt necessary to modify the grub2 menu manually. Alternatively there are native grub2 options for manually adding to the menus. (see /usr/share/doc/grub2/README.Mageia)

Mageia is nice, way better than Mandriva. I'd rank it in the same vein as OpenSUSE for the following reasons:

- Reasonably up-to-date packages (version differs by about +-0.1 or +-0.0.1 from the latest upstream
- Reasonably recent kernel (usually just a 0.1 release slower although I prefer to roll my own from kernel.org)
- 32bit glibc, libstdc++ and X libraries are already preloaded; no having to dig around for them like with Fedora and the Debian-based distributions.

What i truly, truly cannot stand about Mageia is the urpmi package manager. Rpmdrake always insists that it has to restart itself to resolve some updated dependencies so the GUI tool is out of the question. And urpmi is so inflexible with queries that if you don't have the full perfect package namestring to query it will always return nothing.

[Alex Sarmiento]

Mageia is so 2000

[Vax456]

I agree that Grub2 can be hard to use, but I think that's the fault of distributions not making it possible to turn off the automatic grub.cfg generator script and allowing you to edit yourself. I've run Grub2 on Debian/Ubuntu and on Gentoo, and I think Grub2 is much less of a burden to use on Gentoo than on Debian/Ubuntu because it doesn't overwrite your configuration unless you tell it to.

Here's my grub.cfg file:

menuentry "Gentoo" {
        set root=(hd0,1)
        linux /boot/gentoo-kernel root=/dev/sda1 init=/usr/bin/systemd
}

menuentry "Windows" {
        set root=(hd0,2)
        chainloader +1
}

Nice and simple.

I think Grub2, within itself, is easier (not simpler) to use than Grub Legacy, but distributions make it more complicated than it has to be.

[timothyja]

Downloaded and will be making the switch from Ubuntu tonight. I really like the philosophies of this distro. Community focus, extremly open including finacial reports, and a non-profit organisation. What more could you ask for.

[DestroyFX]

I installed with grub2... asks in setup. and works perfectly.. very stable... very fast...

And now compile a new kernel and add some boot parameters to it (that resist to updates)