Re: Towards a customized Grub2

[Richard Owlett]

On 05/30/2017 09:26 AM, adrian15 adrian15 wrote:
> 2017-05-30 12:40 GMT+02:00 Richard Owlett <address@hidden>:
>
> > On 05/29/2017 07:17 PM, John Little wrote:
> >
> > > Richard Owlett asked for a grub2 customized to his wishes.
> > >
> > > How to obtain and install?
> > > >
> > >
> > > (This from memory before I got an UEFI computer.  Please, anyone,
> > > criticize the following.)
> >
> > I approve of trimming, BUT ;/
> > You trimmed one {perhaps poorly worded} sentence too much.
> > I had said:
> >   > I am assuming a Grub2 executable conforming exactly to the
> >   > official documentation.
> > In your first paragraph you alluded to a "can of worms" I'm trying to
> > avoid when you said:
> >   > A lot of what people see as part of Grub, like the "OS prober",
> >   > "update-grub", and custom entries in /etc/grub.d belong to
> >   > debian, and grub is agnostic about them.
> >
> > What I want "to obtain and install" is an "unadulterated canonical Grub2".
> > Does what I want even exist in the "www.gnu.org/software/grub/" universe
> > of discourse? Or is Grub2 itself only a set of building blocks and
> > intentionally not a complete entity {right word?}?
> There is not an unadulterated canonical Grub2 (as you understand it in a
> binary form that you can just download and install) unless maybe the
> Windows release which it's built previous to its release. The rest of the
> canonical Grub2 releases only exists as 'source code' and you are supposed
> to build them.

I was beginning to suspect as much - see my response to Dale.

> > You also said:
> >   > ... running several installs, reinstalling occasionally,...
> > and
> >   > ... implies you haven't installed it yet.
> >
> > That points out something I did not explicitly state in this thread.
> > My underlying motivation for the question is that I'm experimenting
> > with releases and configurations. I have a machine physically set
> > aside for my experiments. I have done as many as 15 installs from
> > scratch in one week.
> > I've had as many as 5 fully functioning installs at one time.
> >
> > I suppose the critical question is "does the Grub2 project have
> > functional equivalents of "OS prober" and "update-grub"?
> What you can do is what you can find on my Super Grub2 Disk project
> that is... using scripts that emulates 'OS prober' or 'Update grub'
> because it provides a dynamic boot menu based on what you have
> installed. Super Grub2 Disk is meant to be run from an external usb
> or cdrom though.

You mentioned that yesterday. I got so far as to retrieve a unused flash 
drive from my stock. Then Murphy's Law triggered. May get to it tomorrow 
<grin>.

> [snip]
>
> Note: 'OS Prober' checks partition starts for determining if an
> Operating system is Windows 7, 8, 8.1, 10 and so on. [snip]

No problem. Mr. Gates long banished ;/

> I also do not find quite viable your quest of installing many OSes on
> one physical machine while avoiding them to overwrite the default
> grub which you pretend to install on sda2 (if I'm not mistaken).
> I mean, don't get me wrong, it can be done, of course, but you might
> forget to untick the Grub installation in one distro installation...

No problem, preseed.cfg to the rescue.


> [snip]
> But there's a secondary audience for powerusers that install many
> OSes in a single system (not so common nowadays because of
> virtualisation).

There are also people people like me <*GRIN*>