A few random thoughts (I apologize in advance if I don't make a whole
lot of sense, I'm a tad ill and my brain isn't in full working order
right now)
1. I just came across GRUB today (well, I may have come across it
earlier, when it was in a less-useable-state, and decided to pass), and
I like what I'm seeing. I just wish that I had found out about GRUB a
few days ago when I was trying to help a friend resurrect his Linux box
(it would halt at 'LI') This is a very powerful tool, and probably the
best pre-alpha software I've ever seen ;-)
2. Of course, that doesn't mean it's perfect.. While I was testing
things, I came across an error saying the initial ramdisk I was trying
to load was too big. (I'm on a 10-day old RedHat Linux 6.1
installation, I haven't bothered to re-compile the kernel to my personal
preferences yet..) The file size is 337490 bytes, which didn't seem
particularly large to me. (What is the current limit anyway?)
3. This could probably be considered a second part to the previous
problem. When I would try to boot Linux like this:
grub> kernel (hd0,0)/boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/sda1
<happy messages>
grub> initrd (hd0,0)/boot/initrd
<bad messages: initrd is too large>
grub> boot
The system would boot up normally until it started checking the
filesystems. It seems that even though the initrd didn't get loaded,
Linux would mount the root filesystem in read-write mode, causing fsck
to barf, and then forcing me to re-boot the system. I would think this
could be handled better. However, I'm not sure if this is GRUB's fault,
Linux's fault, or a combination..
4. Here is an idea for a feature of GRUB. Have GRUB read a file off of
a floppy or other device to decide which OS to load on a per-boot
basis. The file could contain the string from the appropriate 'title'
line in menu.lst or just a number stating which menu option to load.
(There is some more reasoning behind this idea here:
http://archives.real-time.com/tclug-list/1999/Oct/msg00375.html)
Anyway, I appreciate the work you all have done so far, and I'm
especially happy to see that development is ongoing.
Best of luck!
--
_ _ _ _ _ ___ _ _ _ ___ _ _ __ I came, I saw, I
/ \/ \(_)| ' // ._\ / - \(_)/ ./| ' /(__ conquered. -- Tux
\_||_/|_||_|_\\___/ \_-_/|_|\__\|_|_\ __)
[ Mike Hicks | http://umn.edu/~hick0088 | mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] ]
