14.2 installer (lilo, grub, and btrfs)
 

I have searched through the forums for this and didn't see anything, but obviously I could have missed it. If I'm not the first person to bring this up, please tell me and we can promptly delete this thread :)

Secondly, I love Slackware and hope it's around for many, many years to come. I just want to make sure I"m not just being dense on this issue and also see if the community response is that I'm just being an idiot here. After all, my current job forces me to use RHEL and CentOS exclusively, so Slackware and I don't get as much quality time as we did in the past!

Slackware defaults to LILO but also offers GRUB within the installer. However, if you choose to deselect LILO and only install GRUB, the installer will not guide you through any GRUB setup process as it does with LILO. You're just on your own. For me, this was no problem at all, but it struck me as a possible negative for others.

The Slackware installer freely lets you choose btrfs, but doing so (unless I'm mistaken) necessitates using GRUB instead of LILO, unless you set up a separate /boot that's formatted as a supported filesystem, e.g. ext4.

Someone unaware of these caveats can easily go through the installer, choose btrfs, and make it all the way to the end of the install process, only to witness the installer-guided LILO setup fail. Once they figure out they need GRUB instead, the user will likely repeat the whole process, and then the installer will make no attempt to install GRUB to the MBR.

Again, I love Slackware. I've used it on/off for the last ~20 years, and I know that most of us appreciate the minimal hand-holding, and also that savvy users will be aware of all this and will have no problem navigating through such a situation... but is it sensical to change the installer to account for these things? It seems odd for the installer to be so cuddly and guided in some ways but then almost leave users out to dry if they make the "wrong" choice during the install process. Maybe the answer is just a pop up warning when choosing btrfs?

do not change the interface

the user should read the README's first and documention.

elilo/lilo is the official installer, grub is difficult to install whether version 1 or 2.

btrfs needs a seperate /boot, like lvm userland tools are needed to autodiscover btrfs and lvm partitions. I am not aware that grub can boot btrfs partitions directly as far as version 1 is concerned.

That is simply not the case for BIOS systems. I do not yet have an UEFI motherboard, so I cannot comment on the level of difficulty there.

I have Grub working flawlessly on my gpt paritioned disk with a btrfs root and ext4 boot.

All you have to do with grub is chroot into the system, create the boot grub directory, generate the configuration file, than install grub to the boot record.

Well consider that newbie to Slackware which offers no facilities for everything you mentioned at install time.

I was refering to the manual configuration of grub conf files,....

Just to play the devil's advocate, where should Pat draw the line? If you choose to not select a full install and elect to leave out aaa_elflibs, your system would be broken, but you're still free to do this without any warnings from the installer... just as if you were to not select the default ext4 and select btrfs as your primary boot filesystem.

I do get what you're saying, and it might be a good idea to put a check in the installer to verify that if btrfs is being used to inform the user how things need to be set up, but if Pat starts adding checks for this, maybe he should start adding it for other situations as well... which could start a massive if/then check system, which would add a lot of time for Pat to verify everything works as it should to ensure all the "different" setups are detected and managed accordingly.

I never found grub 1 configuration to be more opaque than lilo configuration. With this script, I don't manually configure grub2 so that isn't an issue.

Unlike lilo, if I do screw up grub configuration, I can use the grub command line tools to figure out what I messed up and actually boot the system without a rescue disk.

Your mileage may vary, of course.

Keep the install method the same...If someone wants to venture outside of the defaults then it is their responsibility to know what they are doing. Lets remember Slackware is not a hold your hand distro., it is a Read and Learn distro...PV does enough already lets not add more burdens that could be taken up by the community etc....perhaps, someone could create a wiki or Slackdoc on how to use btrfs, grub (1 or 2) etc...

For what its worth, btrfs is far from ready for stable, one needs to just glance over openSUSE and Mageia forums to see the problems people have had. It does have promise, but is still a beta FS IMO.

I think you all make really great points

I agree that Slackware should not go down the path of trying to be "smarter," and it's a very slippery slope about where to draw the line when you do anything in this regard. The installer's lack of assistance in setting up grub makes complete sense to me when thinking back to how grub used to only be offered as a package in "extras."

As someone who uses BTRFS with LILO on many boxes I like things as they are. Its possible to use the installer to install into a subvol and get LILO booting the new system from an initrd using the generic kernel all in a single reboot if you know how. I can imagine there are many permutations of what kind of muli-parition/subvolume arrangements people would possibly want.

Trying to make the installer handle all this would be a hugely complex under taking with lots of corner cases difficult and time consuming to test, diverting resources better used elsewhere and more than likely get in the way for anyone trying to do something even slightly exotic. Right now the simplicity is offering lots of flexibility.

It's not the fact that the installer lacks anything, it's up to you to read up ahead of time using things like the wiki and other documentation to ready yourself prior to installation.

Slackware has a load of information on the installation media that you should read BEFORE installing and if you know you will need things like Grub, BtrFS, etc. you should research and plan those well ahead of time.

If you read the install notes, the documentation, or even Google, most beginner installs with Slackware use EXT4 on a single /(root) partition with only a standard swap partition with LILO/eLILO to boot it on either a BIOS or UEFI system with either gpt or mbr partitioning methods. It's basically to "Get your feet wet." Things like using LUKS, RAID, LVM, advanced partitioning methods with JFS and BtrFS, multi-drive mounting, etc. aren't and have never been classed for beginners.

My issue is with the "new" Grub 2
 

Along with Ubuntu Xenial, one gets Grub 2.02 beta 2-36 Ubuntu (or it got upgraded to 2-36. whatever...)

My issue isn't really one issue, it's four. (I'm a woman, so I can be illogical.*)

• First, the "documentation" (let's take "Simple configuration' for example), doesn't agree with what I'm seeing in my /etc/default/grub. I have made NO changes to that file on either partition. I have two Linux installations - one to use and one to practice on when I might break something. Checking out Grub 2 online, I found that the /etc/default/grub was supposed to have Advanced Options, but it doesn't. I think they're in another module (see third reason below) Both my Linux partitions, made with Gparted, but the Grub menu I get at startup doesn't agree with what in my /etc/default/grub or the "info <grub>".

• The second reason I'm not happy with the reason I don't like the Grub beta is that I don't like it when somebody sneaks beta stuff into a release without asking me if it's okay. They could have offered the option to stay with Grub 2 on a simple or even a multiboot Linux only system. If I wanted folks sneaking possibly-before-its-time stuff onto my system, I could have let MS keep sneaking Win 10 on a bit at a time...

• Now for the third reason I don't like the Grub beta 2-36. Whoever wrote the info was definitely a programmer and I laud them for at least trying to document Grub 2.02 beta. But I used to manage teams of s/w and h/w engineers** and I was the one who had to translate all of the Engineering S/W release documents into something the customers could understand. I also had to try to explain in English what the hardware changes were. This was sometimes difficult, because 2/3 of the engineers at a couple of companies I worked for spoke Russian most of the time. I did learn some great Russian swear words to get their attention with when I needed them to explain it real slowfor the Product Manager. So, I know that documentation is hard and not very exciting. But folks like me could get involved with that kind of stuff... I can't program - mostly because I hate it - but I can write. (Verbose mode) Just look at this novella!

• Lastly, the info refers to DOS or Windows systems way too often. Too many of the examples are now changed to DOS/WIN examples. In my personal opinion, Windows 10 is an abomination. (I thought the MS version of ET phoned home too often in Win7. And giving Grub to Windows users (Windows only users) is just wrong. On the other hand, I did notice that Grub 2.02 bet 2-36 supports floppy drives. For all the people upgrading to Windows 10 from XP?**

Please note the foregoing bunch of words are opinions of mine.They do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the management. Or you.


* I realize other women on this forum are probably far younger than I and haven't learned to be illogical yet. Manage software and hardware engineers for as many years as I did and you'll learn that special breed of "illogic" also. Program for long enough and ????
** I really did manage s/w and h/w engineer teams for years. Maybe that's why I take so many psych meds now.
*** Yes, I'm old enough to remember XP. I even remember DOS and Windows 3.1 and extended vs. expanded memory. And I remember floppy drives, but can't remember when I saw one last. (Excepting Episode 11 of Season 2 of Mr. Robot.)

And lest you think I don't know how to program, I programmed in assembler for IBM mainframes - and my Commodore 64, wrote and corrected microcode for processor cards and re-wrote Fortran code when I found errors during system test. I can write a smidge of Python and a little C++, but where's the fun in these high level languages?

Perhaps you should ask this in the Ubuntu forums since you appear to be using Ubuntu. This is the Slackware forum, a Linux distribution that is exceedingly unlike Ubuntu.

We do like to hear you complain about Ubuntu though.
(I found the novella riveting)