GRUB 2 Receives New Font Engine

[yogi_berra]

This sounds more like it's begging for a fork of GRUB than anything else- there's solid reasons why LILO is deprecated. I'm not kidding.

There are also solid reasons why Grub was completely re-written. Ask anyone that has attempted to port Grub Legacy to a new architecture about how lovely the experience is.

[Svartalf]

Yeah, there is "a patch" but since the Grub maintainers are refusing to deal with "Grub Legacy," it is just an unofficial patch floating around. Some distributors use it; I don't know if all do. Meanwhile "Grub Legacy" is spouting off a useless (worse, *deceiving*) error message for this problem.

Meanwhile LILO works fine...

This sounds more like it's begging for a fork of GRUB than anything else- there's solid reasons why LILO is deprecated. I'm not kidding.

[massysett]

There's been a patch for the bigger inodes for grub1 for a while.

Yeah, there is "a patch" but since the Grub maintainers are refusing to deal with "Grub Legacy," it is just an unofficial patch floating around. Some distributors use it; I don't know if all do. Meanwhile "Grub Legacy" is spouting off a useless (worse, *deceiving*) error message for this problem.

Meanwhile LILO works fine...

[Svartalf]

If the choice is between this bloated Grub 2 and LILO, I will pick LILO.

You're lucky LILO even works for you. It relies on the block position of the file to boot, so it has other, nastier failure modes (We've encountered one with one of our probes back three weeks ago at Tektronix (my day job...)- can't go into details, but suffice it to say, LILO's actually WORSE in many regards to GRUB.). There's a reason most of the distros went to it instead of LILO a while back.

[curaga]

There's been a patch for the bigger inodes for grub1 for a while.

I agree they should get a stable grub2 out and then start working on eyecandy if they want.

[massysett]

Scripting support? Conditionals? Way too complicated. Meanwhile, Grub 1 recently failed on me because of its vaunted support for reading filesystems. I had installed a new system with ext3, and it had bigger inodes that Grub couldn't read. Of course it took awhile to figure this out. Meanwhile, what worked just fine? LILO! So right now I am having Grub chainload LILO.

If the choice is between this bloated Grub 2 and LILO, I will pick LILO.

[KellyClowers]

Grub2 is great, I have been using it since early last year, and had fewer problems than with grub1

[yoshi314]

there are some unofficial patches for old grub as well, just google it.

as far as this news go - i'd rather see a stable release of grub2, and not bother with eye-candy.

[IanW]

As I understand it (nb: I'm fairly noobish) Grub2 is a requirement for the move to ext4.

[yesterday]

Firstly, I believe GRUB2 will have better device detection and will support more filesystems than GRUB1. Secondly, I'm not sure how important error handling is. TBH, unless you are constantly reinstalling distros on your system, how often do you play around with GRUB confiugrations? More precisely, how often do you re-install grub on a partition? The newbie problem is better handled in the distor itself, making sure that sane and working options are set. Finally, the graphical component of GRUB2 was requested to allow for a better and more seamless desktop experience. Currently it is OK in GRUB1, with some SuSe hacks giving the best results. But after so long if the graphical aspect of grub isn't any nicer than GRUB1, then that would be an opportunity lost.