Re: [gentoo-user] Grub2 and is the upgrade a tooth puller.

[Alex Schuster]

Dale writes:

> Neil Bothwick wrote:

> > Seriously though, why not use make install? That way you know the
> > right files get copied and given the expected names.
>
> Because I name my kernel and config the same thing.  I also don't like
> the way it does that link thingy it does.  It seems to expect to keep
> only two kernels around and I'm real bad to have more than that,
> sometimes way more than that.  Plus, if I do it myself, I know what I am
> doing.  If I use make install, I don't know if something was changed in
> how it does it.
>
> It's just me being me.  lol

No, me too. In my history of using Linux, I very often had trouble with
new kernels. When I had an NVidia graphics card, that often caused
trouble. Nowadays it's ISDN sometimes.

The fact that I build a new kernel does not necessarily mean that I want
to boot it yet. And I want to keep old kernels around, several, not only
the last one. I do not reboot often, so sometimes multiple kernel versions
have been installed since the last reboot. I would not want my current
kernel to have vanished, just in case I will need it again when the new
ones do not work. With kernel >= 3.4.3 I had two weird panics in the last
two weeks, I am still using it, but maybe I will need 3.3.5 again, which
would be the sixth-newest one. And I think that maybe hibernation and
ISDN used to work longer ago, maybe I will give the last 2.6 kernel a try
again.

So I use genkernel to build and install new kernels, and modify grub.conf
manually to add this kernel to the menu. The .config is also being copied
to the boot partition, using a similar name as the kernel and the
initramfs.

I'll continue to use the old Grub, as it's working fine for me. I
understand it very well, probably because there is not much to
understand. Ususally it only takes root (hd0,0) and setup (hd0) commands
to install, and the config file is very easy to edit.

I had some painful experiences with Grub2 on Ubuntu, and did not
understand for a while what to do. There's too much automagic involved,
scripts creating the actual grub.cfg file. Config files in /etc/grub.d
and /etc/default/grub. There's grub-install, grub-setup, update-grub, and
what else. The Grub menu is shown only if there are multiple operating
systems installed, it took me quite a while to figure out how to make it
appear at all.

Gentoo is a distro for experts they say, but for me it seems to be
actually easier than other distros like Ubuntu which are supposed to be
easy. Yes, they are, but only when you do standard things. If your setup
is somewhat special, it's actually harder to figure out what is necessary
to do, at least that's my experience.

	Wonko