GRUB 2.00 Bootloader Officially Released 163
An anonymous reader writes "After being in development for more than a decade, GRUB2 was released today as stable. The mailing list announcement covers new features including a standard theme, support for new file-systems, ports to new CPU architectures, new driver coverage, better EFI support, and many other new features that have materialized over the years of development to succeed GRUB Legacy."
Just in time to say good-bye (Score:5, Interesting)
The amusing thing about this is, with secure boot coming out GRUB2 will probably be tossed out in favour of a boot loader with a more liberal license. Ubuntu has already stated they are dropping GRUB2, I imagine other distros will follow in the next few years.
Original Grub is still better (Score:4, Interesting)
Rarely have I seen a bigger pile of shit than the configuration for grub 2. The config for grub 1 was so simple... and it *almost* made sense. They should have dropped the hurd device naming, but kept the grub.conf format we all know and love. This was another bit of software someone just had to rewrite. Now you have to generate a new configuration after any change.
Only thing I hate worse is systemd.
Re:This is it. (Score:5, Interesting)
No, not really. As designed, it was intended to prevent hardware vendors from designing hardware with locked-down Linux installations. In this case, it is trying (unsuccessfully) to prevent enthusiasts from being able to install locked-down Linux on off-the-shelf ARM hardware without breaking their ability to switch back to Windows. The fact that you also won't be able to install non-locked-down Linux on that hardware is a secondary issue. It's a clear case of the GPLv3 acting against the right to tinker solely for reasons of ideological purity—the right to change everything or the right to change nothing.... That's truly backwards in my book.
The fact of the matter is that not enough people care about running Linux to convince manufacturers to push back on Microsoft over the ARM UEFI Secure Boot mandate. There is exactly one way to guarantee the right to tinker, and that is to get people from the geek community elected to governing bodies so that they can propose and pass legislation that mandates that right. Any other strategies are doomed to failure. It doesn't even have to be federal law. If the State of California passed a law saying that all electronic devices purchased using California tax dollars must provide a way for the user to install alternative operating systems without removing the user's ability to run the OS that came with it, Microsoft's attempts at mandating non-disableable UEFI Secure Boot on ARM would go down like a lead balloon even if no other legislature adopted such a provision.
Re:GRUB2many troubles (Score:2, Interesting)
Kernel upgrades required updating the MBR with Lilo, which required running Lilo to perform the update (as root/sudo) (not that much of a burden, as you'd have to be root to update the kernel too. It was just inelegant.). Grub 1 ("legacy") did not require running a command, but rather could be updated by updating the /boot/menu.lst file, which is a more elegant/unixy and generally easier to understand.
/etc/grub/ into the required /boot/menu.lst file). This removes one of Grubs features that they used be so excited about.
Grub 2 however, breaks this feature, and requires a command to be executed after updating the kernel (to convert the updated kernel list in
Personally, I don't use Grub 2 because 1) it didn't detect my triple boot properly (it would detect Ubuntu, but not Fedora or Windows) and 2) when I tried to fix it by hand (I'd already been fixing the configuration for Fedora by hand for some time) the syntax and files had changed so much, NOTHING I had learned previously seemed to be applicable. Near as I could tell, I was supposed to write some shell script which would produce the proper syntax, so that the auto detect would work. I switched to Lilo, which has since worked very well, since I can write a configuration file, run a command, and know that my computer will provide a menu to select my operating system. (although I've found the release of EXTLINUX intriguing, and may switch again in the near future.)
Re:This is it. (Score:4, Interesting)
GPLv3 requires unlocked hardware, mandating that if the user is in not in charge, the user is not allowed to use the software. Another software company mandates that all hardware vendors require bootstrap loaders in order to be qualified to run their OS. Now, suddenly there's a whole host of hardware vendors that have to choose whether to take the safe bet and ship a Windows-based OS or completely and probably permanently sever their ties with Microsoft.
When it comes to stomping Linux into the ground, the GPLv3 is Microsoft's wet dream.
The problem is that more and more hardware is moving towards signed firmware. This transition is inevitable because the level of malware in computing today is just too high, and the only way to reliably prevent malware is to know with some degree of certainty who wrote a particular piece of code. Within 5-10 years, you will likely be unable to buy commodity hardware that can run unsigned code (except maybe for specialized server boxes). This is inevitable, and isn't something you can change by whining about it.
So your choices are pretty much either to accept that the world is changing and adapt or continue pissing into the wind. Either way, the result will be the same. If you want freedom to tinker, you're going to have to provide an alternative. This means either passing laws to mandate that vendors provide an alternative or coming up with a standard scheme for single-device-specific signing certificates (and shared infrastructure to provide such certificates) that the hardware vendors can all agree to support. Either way, there are several prerequisites:
Anything short of that pretty much spells the end of Linux except as an embedded OS and/or specialized server OS on specialized hardware. Whether it happens now or ten years from now is unimportant. That's the direction things are going. Ubuntu et al took the first step in that list, but that step is incompatible with GPLv3 unless and until the remaining two steps are taken.