On Friday, October 28, 2011 11:40:00 AM, Allen Weiner wrote: > On Thu, 2011-10-27 at 19:44 -0400, John Mort wrote: > > I am doing the upgrade to Ubuntu 11.10 today, and started thinking. > > I've had this install running since 7.10 or 8.04, and have just been > > upgrading it all along. Is there ever a good reason to back things up > > and do a fresh install of the new OS rather than doing the upgrade? > > > > -- > > A consideration which might be of interest to you if your setup is > multi-boot and you use distribution-supplied boot managers. With Ubuntu > distribution-upgrades, your boot manager continues to be grub-legacy. If > you do an Ubuntu clean-install, your boot manager will be grub2. > > My setup is multi-boot. My primary distro is Fedora and Ubuntu is one of > my secondary distros. My primary boot manager is grub-legacy, "owned" by > Fedora. The boot-manager supplied by Ubuntu is my secondary > boot-manager. I had to make adjustments when switching from an Ubuntu > having grub-legacy as its boot-manager to an Ubuntu having grub2 as its > boot manager.
The mutli-boot case where you'd want to chainload multiple copies of grub2 is exactly the case grub2 doesn't like and which can be problematic, because grub2 doesn't like being embedded within a filesystem. Doing so requires using "blocklists" (here that means a list of disk blocks). From what I understand, how this is done is filesystem dependent, and grub2 always complains about it during an installation into a filesystem. In early version of grub2 this configuration was "buggy and unsupported". I'm also on grub2 and have been for years, but the transition from grub-legacy to grub2 comes at some cost -- the configuration of grub2 is totally different and has also been broken up into several files and several locations. -- Chris -- Chris Knadle [email protected] _______________________________________________ Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group http://mhvlug.org http://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm) MHVLS Auditorium Nov 2 - POV-Ray and The Relativity Train Dec 7 - An Intro to Chef Jan 4 - Recovering the Brownfield: Revitalizing Open Source Projects
