[conspire] Building grub-1.95

[David Fox]

> 4.Gutsy switches between hda and sda now in the menu.lst.
> 5. Grub uses Hd0 etc...instead of hda 0r sda
> 6. Gutsy started using uuid=xxxx... instead of root/dev/hda in the
> menu.lst

I am not sure what is going on here. There have been much mentions of
the hard disk interface changing, especially with newer hard drives
and/or newer versions of the linux kernel. As I understand things, if
you have SATA hard drive interfaces, then the hard drives are
/dev/sda, /dev/sdb, and so forth, while for PATA (old style) they are
/dev/hda & /dev/hdb.

Even with debian Lenny and PATA hardware on my old clunker box (6 yr
old Athlon Tbird) the devices show up as /dev/hd* and not as /dev/sd*.
This is with a relatively recent kernel (2.6.22).

I see there's been a recommendation to do devices by UUID in the
/etc/fstab. I don't fully understand how to do it, although it would
seem that there are benefits in doing so, since you have each
partition labelled with some sort of a volume label, and you mount
based on that info, and not by absolute partition number.

Gutsy should use one or the other. What do you mean by "switches"?
Does it come up one way always or does it arbitrarily use /dev/hd* in
some boots and /dev/sd* in others? Hopefully, it would not be doing
that.


> 7.When they say root =(hd0,0) in the menu list or grub prompt, what
> is that
> pointing at? Hd0 is obviously the Windows hda HD.

grub uses a different naming convention. Based on 0, rather than 1, so
(hd0,0) means the first available hard drive (typically /dev/hda), and
the first partition.

> 8. What does it mean when the win 98 flashes through the boot splash
> screen then drops you into a C:> prompt?When you try and boot it.

Offhand, I'd suggest something drastically went wrong with Windows
somewhere. But I don't have windows on any of my machines (current
count of machines ==1 at the moment).


> 9. I think I grub> setup hd0  and later  did fdisk /mbr to it. I
> don't remember now!

If you did you probably went and butchered your mbr setup.

Should all of your available partitions actually boot? Typically, in a
multiboot setup either one or the other partitions boot (1 being
Windows, 2 being Linux) but some of us have more than one available
partition to boot from. I only have or need one. But I have several
partitions, spread across two drives.

> 10. I got all confused over this but I'm glad Kubutnu Gutsy keeps

If Gutsy hasn't booting problems what is the real issue then?

> 11. I like how Dolphin and Kate work together.

I got a chance to look at kde4 the other day (Open Suse KDE 4 live cd)
and it has dolphin. Pretty nice, although I didn't spend a great daal
of time exploring. Might bring it by on Cabal day.

> 12. It's probably better to have 1 distro per computer.

Decidedly advantageous. On the other hand, you can have other distros
on the machine, but keep one as the "main" one, and in some cases
"boot" into the other one by doing a chroot.

If your box is of sufficient power (i.e., faster than mine) you can
also explore Xen, qemu and the like and run one OS/distro within the
other.

I can, for instance, run 'qemu -cdrom /path/to/iso' and give it the
path to some ISO I have and boot the other distro in a window, but it
won't be fast and I'll probably void my warranty :).