now that grub 2 has finally officially released, do you think there will be chances it will be default on the next release of slackware?

Hahahahahaha

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@Mazer: Default!?

Now granted, I wouldn't mind it as an option. Sure it is a monster but it does do something that lilo and Syslinux can't and that is EFI booting (though I guess getting elilo, Gummiboot or some other small EFI bootloader in /extra is more likely). However, having it as default is certainly not realistic. Grub2 is incredibly complex (people sometimes joke that Grub2 is more like an OS than a bootloader) and attempts to over-automate everything, so it doesn't really fit with Slackware's way of doing things.

Actually another fix for EFI booting would be if a second (>= 3.3) Linux kernel being offered in /extra (in addition to the 3.2.21 LTS default kernel) with CONFIG_EFI_STUB=y. Then it should be possible to use EFISTUB to boot on EFI hardware. Granted the user will still have to do some work to create their own boot disk but it gets Slackware most of the way there to EFI hardware support, without having to include yet another bootloader.

Gummiboot would be an interesting choice for the DIY bootloader fanatics among us: http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/gummiboot

Eric

I'm glad you said that. Now can you try and convince Patrick to consider it for inclusion in /extra for 14?

I haven't actually tried Gummiboot yet (I mean to try it in VirtualBox with EFI set on to test at some point). However, reading the documentation it seems like it is more of a boot manager than a bootloader in that CONFIG_EFI_STUB=y must still be enabled. So if Slackware was to consider for /extra it would still need a suitably compiled, recent kernel.

gummiboot has just been coded, I read Kay's announce a few days ago on gplus
I think it will need a little testing before being included anywhere

Seriously, who would want that? LILO is much easier to handle.

I will just leave this here:

Schmatzler:
Actually, I would. I've been using grub2 for quite a while to boot gpt partitions and having very good luck with it.

I was happy to see the upgrade, because I have been having trouble getting -1.99 to compile with ponce's -current SlackBuild. -2.00 works with just modification of the VERSION.
Regards,
Bill

I haven't touched it because I don't use it (so I can't test it): what I don't touch is what's in slackbuilds.org repository for 13.37, that's not guaranteed to work on current; maybe you're referring to crocket's version for 13.37.

If you test it and can guarantee that upversioning to 2.00 is enough to make it work on -current, I can update it

Unless you have an EFI motherboard you might want to try the Syslinux included with Slackware current. It can also boot GPT partitions (on a machine with BIOS). It is much simpler than Grub2 and doesn't require you installing a handful of extra dependencies.

Edit: Oh and the -current package works on 13.37. I tried it just the other day.

I guess elilo or an extra kernel with EFISTUB are more likely, if we are to get any EFI support in Slackware 14 at all. If no additional bootloader is added it isn't the end of the world. It seems that most (all?) of the new EFI motherboards have a BIOS compatibility option. So it will probably be a while before this is a really big deal and in the mean time it is possible to get things working with a bit of effort.

alien bob laughter was quite eloquent XD. I'm not very much into technical details, but I can't see why grub shouldn't be default, since it's rather stable and, most important, it can handle a number of different boot configurations.

Well, there are a couple of reasons that we never did go for GRUB (so far). The major reason is that GRUB uses its own device names rather than the ones used by the Linux kernel, and there has not always been a reliable way to map Linux names to GRUB names (though with the kernels of the past couple of years nearly everything has migrated to using the same /dev/sd* names). The other reason was that GRUB was never considered stable... until now. Anyway, we'll be taking a look at this, but don't expect it to appear in Slackware 14. It's too large a change to try to take on without introducing another large delay, and we have enough delays still pending.

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