On 18 Jul 2007, at 16:00, Alan McKinnon wrote:
...
I don't know. I think the overview is pretty clear <http://
www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/grub.html#Overview>, and leads into
the remainder of the documentation quite well.
... The big stumbling block is getting people to grasp that grub
is not an OS, it's not a linux app as linux is not in memory yet. And
yet, it can still read files and dirs that linux put there, and it's
config file read at run time is a linux file.
Um... surely the config file (um... grub.conf, right?) is _just_ a file.
It's not a Linux file, it's not a GRUB file, it's just a text file,
which can be edited by any operating system that can write to the
partition.
I have in the past considered putting grub.conf on a FAT32 partition
- I'm not 101% sure that'd work but I've never tried because I never
actually saw the usefulness.
It's enough to make the
average person's head spin (and does) - it can easily take two hours
for me to get a class full of reasonably bright Windows techies to
grasp ...
You clearly have more experience than I do with teaching novices
about Linux.
You might ask them to consider - as a teaching aid - the Windows XP
boot.ini file (I believe this is retired in Vista).
Boot.ini can be edited in Windows' Notepad in much the same way
grub.conf can be edited with vi or nano. Very few Windows users will
have any experience of doing more than removing an extra line (where
the system was dual-booting to a previous installation of Millennium
Edition, for instance) or reducing the countdown time before
automatically booting the default entry, but if your students are
bright then they will be aware of the boot.ini and will have done
that much.
Stroller.
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