Alan McKinnon wrote:
Apparently, though unproven, at 22:51 on Sunday 09 January 2011, Dale did
opine thusly:
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
At least you didn't have to deal with booting linux off a floppy
I had to deal with windoze 3.1 tho. I did boot Linux off a floppy one
time. That was a long time ago to. It worked to my surprise. It
wasn't speedy but it worked.
Dale
:-) :-)
