Re: [gentoo-user] Re: grub chainloader

[Alan McKinnon <alan@linuxholdings.co.za>]

On Wednesday 18 July 2007, Stroller wrote:
> On 18 Jul 2007, at 13:35, Etaoin Shrdlu wrote:
> > ...
> > You can get everything at once and in the same place using the
> > online docs:
> >
> > http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/grub.html
>
> This manual is very excellent.
>
> I believe you can also get it in PDF format - I printed it out over 3
> years ago and still occasionally refer to it. How I miss my former
> employers' printer which would fold & stable paper to give A4 & A5
> booklets.
>
> The GRUB manual is as good as lots of books you'd pay $$$ for.

Yes, it is good documentation, in that everything is there - complete 
docs are a rare thing these days. But few people that I've come across 
thought to check the info pages and get it. 

> >> And they are also written with the assumption that the reader
> >> understands the confines a boot loader has to work in.
>
> 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.

Well there's at least two people who know how boot loaders work. But 
it's not an easy concept to grasp for the average person. I get a feel 
that you are not an average person so your impressions are not valid 
for them. 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. 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 why you use
kernel   (hd0,0)/vmlinuz-<version> <options>
with a separate boot partition, and
kernel   (hd0,0)/boot/vmlinuz-<version> <options>
when /boot is not a separate partition.

Then there's the bit about grub being able to load linux and 
Multiboot-compliant kernels natively, but Windows and others must be 
chainloaded...

None of this means that the grub docs are poor - it's just that 
bootloaders are tricky beasts to grasp and the docs are correspondingly 
hard to write so that Joe Average User gets it all first time through

-- 
Optimists say the glass is half full,
Pessimists say the glass is half empty,
Developers say wtf is the glass twice as big as it needs to be?

Alan McKinnon
alan at linuxholdings dot co dot za
+27 82, double three seven, one nine three five
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