Alan McKinnon wrote:
It's trying to be an OS that's a bootloader as it's primary function.
Think back to the days of lilo. It obviously isn't an OS and doesn't
understand OS concepts - it loads an OS. When that step is done, then and only
then do OS concepts come into play. lilo doesn't even understand how to find a
file on a disk, that's why the lilo command had to be run to tell the
bootloader which sectors on disk it had to shove into memory.
This confused people. It annoyed even more people who often forgot to run lilo
before rebooting. So grub came along, it had the absolute minimum of OS-like
features to find and load a kernel file. It needed it's own syntax of defining
drive names, then would make it's way through the read-only fs it found there
to find the kernel. It supported a small number of file systems, just enough
so that a 50M partition would be usable on almost any platform.
grub2 now looks like GNU/grub (sarcasm intended). It's not a bootloader, it's
a puny OS with one extra feature - it can bootload!
It has support for jpeg, every fs under the sun, and the grub2 ebuild even has
a truetype USE flag.
Yes! Now my life is complete. I've been DYING for years to have a bootloader
that can properly display anti-aliased fonts for the entire 2 seconds it's on-
screen
Well, I have to say that for the moment, the old grub is working fine
here. Just like ntp, that may change next week. I just wonder how much
longer it will take before they get it stabilized and expect everyone to
switch to it? From my understanding, they are not doing much with the
old grub now so it should be to far off.
I don't like to think about the old lilo days. Bad memories. Reminds
me of xorg and hal. o_O
Dale
:-) :-)
