[Mageia-dev] Grub and Grub2

[andre999]

Michel Catudal a écrit :
> Le 2012-02-04 04:32, andre999 a écrit :
[...]
> I have been using xosl for years and it works like a charm. On my 
> computer I needed to install eComStation 2.1(OS/2) and it wants to be 
> on drive A: just like windows. I disconnected the other drives and 
> installed it. After the installation I put my other 2 2TB hards in and 
> put the OS/2 disk as the 3rd disk.
> With xosl it was a breeze, you just tell it to swap drives. On my 
> son's computer I have Win XP as the second drive, using the same method.
>
> The beauty with this is that you never have to worry about windows or 
> OS/2 screwing up your Linux systems during its installation. With the 
> low cost of hard disks it no longer make sense to try to put windows 
> and linux on the same drive

Putting the different systems on the same disk shouldn't be a problem, 
as long as selecting the system to boot is on its' own partition, like 
xosl, and separate from the part which actually loads the particular 
system.  The weakness of grub is that it tries to do both.
With the xosl approach, if sector 0 is overwritten, it is super-simple 
to recreate it without loosing anything.
It would be nice to see grub split into separate system selection and 
(Linux) system boot packages.  With a separate partition for the system 
selection part, like xosl.
If the Linux boot partition (containing /boot) is corrupted, the 
computer becomes unbootable from the hard disk, if grub does the 
selection of the system to boot.  And that can only be fixed by 
repairing the Linux boot partition, which is a lot more problematic than 
simply restoring sector 0 of the first disk.

> ... You are still stuck with the old approach on a laptop though.
> As far as I am concerned I will never use a laptop, the screen and 
> keyboards are too damm small.

A portable still has the advantage of being portable :)
Although small type is almost required to make the screen usable.  
Bigger portables have full-sized keyboards.
[...]
>
> Lately I am using mostly gentoo, I may actually dump Mageia in the 
> future if it is not possible to have gnome 2 or mate. Gnome 2 still 
> works beautifully on gentoo.
> I hate gnome 3 with a passion and I find kde too slow compared to gnome 2.

I use gnome2 as well (in preference to kde for the same reasons), but I 
modify it to have only 1 panel on top.  (To give me more screen space.)
I put all the static icons under one drawer ("tiroir") icon, and group 
all instances of the same application together.  Which works nicely.
Under gnome3 there is at least one project (I forget the name) that 
seems to provide the panels and menus removed by gnome3.  Hopefully that 
will work.
Otherwise I'll be looking for another desktop myself.
>
> Michel
>
-- 
André