HUD: Head-Up Display (changes for Unity)

[SL6-A1000]

Just to set the record straight, so this does not become an ugly rumour, the person currently at the helm of Debian is Stefano Zacchiroli. I forget the name of the last leader, but it is not Shuttleworth.
The notion that Shuttleworth is involved with Debian, let lone running it , is probably a vile rumour started by an Ubuntuphile who thinks Debian is part of Ubuntu, because Ubuntu uses Debian software.

Just to clarify, i wasn't intending on spreading misinformation! , i had read it in an article/ magazine about Shuttleworth, i just can't quite remember where though.

Well, I didn't like GRUB and I loathed GRUB2. Why put a big complex scripting language into a bootloader? For me, one of the most important things is to know how my system works; that was why I fell in love with Linux. I don't have any idea how GRUB works, so I prefer to use LILO which is conceptually simple.

All these new things not only make Linux more like the proprietary OS's; they also make it almost impossible to understand what is going on under the hood, and that's a huge step backwards.

Agreed, GRUB2 is probably over-complex with the scripting language, but GRUB V0.97 (legacy) was pretty simple, quite similar to LILO, it only required editing of the menu.lst file and an understanding of how grub recognizes partitions and OS's. With grub2 you have to understand the basics of how grub recognizes it and then you have to understand the scripting language they implemented into it, so you can added or edit the grub scripts (i.e. custom).

What i don't understand is why didn't they just update it, by adding the same functionality to legacy grub?
What I mean by that is, was the scripting language absolutely necessary to add that additional functionality in grub2? From what i've read about/ know about GRUB legacy and GRUB2 are that the only real significant changes are that instead of updating grub manually, GRUB2 can be updated automatically. It still doesn't prevent users from still having to manually add or edit the custom list to add OS's if they aren't recognized on the initial update or configuration.

Which literally mean this:
Legacy GRUB
Red Hat Users:

su gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst

Debian Users:

sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst

+ and then changing what you want in the menu list

GRUB2
Red Hat Users:

su update-grub

Debian Users:

sudo update-grub

Both support GUID partition table (EFI) and MBR partition table (BIOS), well from what i've read on the GRUB website nothing suggests otherwise. Which only leaves the filesystem support...

[elija]

Grub 2 also supports UUIDs which is better for booting external disks and non x86 type architectures. I read somewhere (that I can't find now) that the original grub code had become a tangled mass of spaghetti which was hard to maintain. I have no idea how accurate that article was.

It's not that difficult to configure.

/etc/default/grub is a text file with your configuration variables
/etc/grub.d is a folder that holds a file for each menu entry. The files will start with a number that indicates the order they appear on the menu. They do look overly complicated when compared to menu.lst. Fortunately, I've never needed to edit one They can be enabled / disabled simply by marking them executable or not.

and of course update-grub sorts everything out.

Having said all that, it was definitely easier to manually configure grub so on that basis alone I would have to say that the original grub was better ^_^

[Jonathan183]

Information on grub can be found here. The configuration for grub2 can be quite straight forward see here.
I somethimes use the config files and update-grub and sometime manually modify menu information (actually copy information into /etc/grub.d/41_custom and use update-grub). Grub2 took a bit more getting used to than grub legacy but then there are a few more features available. At the time I switches to ext4 grub legacy did not support boot from ext4 so I started using grub2, otherwise I would probably have stuck with grub legacy

[hazel]

At the time I switched to ext4 grub legacy did not support boot from ext4 so I started using grub2, otherwise I would probably have stuck with grub legacy

This is a classic example of how "improvements" just make for extra complications. One of the "advantages" touted for GRUB is that it can understand filesystems. LILO can't; it just uses physical disk addresses written into it by /sbin/lilo. But that means that LILO can be set to boot any kind of filesystem that at least one of your kernels can read. GRUB can only boot filesystems it's been taught to understand. A new filesystem completely throws it and we have to have a new GRUB!