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phoronix
08-06-2009, 10:40 AM
Phoronix: Red Hat's Plymouth Sees New Activity

Plymouth, the Red Hat graphical boot loader replacement that leverages kernel mode-setting to provide a clean and flicker-free boot experience, is in the process of receiving a number of new updates. Plymouth right now is largely just used by Fedora, but it's been picked up for Mandriva 2010, and Canonical was going to switch to it in Ubuntu 9.10, but that decision was retracted...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=NzQzNg
madman2k
08-06-2009, 01:08 PM
http://www.stefantrocha.de/files/page0_blog_entry78_1.jpg
:rolleyes:
Louise
08-06-2009, 01:34 PM
Argh... And I just figured out how to install GRUB on a clean virtual disk :)

kpartx -l imagefile
kpartx -a imagefile

mount /dev/mapper/loop0pX /mnt/tmp -o loop,rw # replace X with part. nr

chroot /mnt/tmp

#get device type (e.g. hda or sda)
df -h
# look also at "boot=" in /etc/grub.conf

grub-install --recheck --root-directory=/ /dev/sda

umount /mnt/tmp
kpartx -d imagefile


I have never understood why LILO and GRUB have to probe the BIOS just to install a boot loader. And why does it also have to do it for a virtual disk that is mounted?

Maybe Plymouth will clean this up?
madman2k
08-06-2009, 02:01 PM
michael confused this. plymouth is not a boot loader, but a boot splash screen. You still need grub. But your efforts were still senseless, since ubuntu karmic+ will use grub2, and the other distributions will likely follow :)
Louise
08-06-2009, 02:07 PM
michael confused this. plymouth is not a boot loader, but a boot splash screen. You still need grub. But your efforts were still senseless, since ubuntu karmic+ will use grub2, and the other distributions will likely follow :)

HA! And I fell for it :)

Glad that GRUB won't be replaced anytime soon.

I am actually just reading about MBR, because I REALLY would like to know why the BIOS is needed to write a MBR.

Bootstrapping operating systems, after the computer's BIOS passes execution to machine code instructions contained within the MBR.


But why is this needed for virtual bootable disks??? A Virtual Machine doesn't have a BIOS.


Apparently harddisks can not exceed 2TiB!

Because the block size is 512 bytes, this implies that neither the maximum size of a partition nor the maximum start address (both in bytes) can exceed 232 × 512 bytes, or 2 TiB. Alleviating this capacity limitation is one of the prime motivations for the development of the GUID Partition Table (GPT).


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_boot_record

So GUID Partition Table is going to be really interesting to follow!!!
hubick
08-06-2009, 02:37 PM
All I know is, when I booted Fedora 11 and it decided to scan/verify my hard disk, the graphical boot just sat there like something in the background had locked up, with no status messages or anything. I removed "rhgb" from my grub.conf and that was the last of it. The text boot might not be as pretty, but at least it lets me know WTF is going on.
Louise
08-06-2009, 02:40 PM
All I know is, when I booted Fedora 11 and it decided to scan/verify my hard disk, the graphical boot just sat there like something in the background had locked up, with no status messages or anything. I removed "rhgb" from my grub.conf and that was the last of it. The text boot might not be as pretty, but at least it lets me know WTF is going on.

Are you kidding? :) Text mode is so much prettier than ANY Fedora Theme :)

I have been using RedHat/Fedora for 9 years, and would never change, but their themes are the ugliest of all Linux distributions!
Kano
08-06-2009, 03:22 PM
@Louise

I don't know what grub has todo with that topic, but /dev/sda must be wrong, even in chroot.
Louise
08-06-2009, 03:24 PM
@Louise

I don't know what grub has todo with that topic, but /dev/sda must be wrong, even in chroot.

I did first try /dev/xvda, but gave an error.

With /dev/sda it wrote the stage1 in MBR.

Do you know an easier way?
MaestroMaus
08-06-2009, 05:51 PM
This news post was the most useless one ever...
Kano
08-06-2009, 06:27 PM
@Louise

I don't know how to install grub2 in an image, but grub1 is possilbe this way:

http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?t=11653
Louise
08-07-2009, 11:56 AM
@Louise

I don't know how to install grub2 in an image, but grub1 is possilbe this way:

http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?t=11653

I think I use grub1 as well.
[root@localhost ~]# rpm -qa|grep -i grub
grub-0.97-13.2
[root@localhost ~]#


but I don't have --device-map

Does this install stage1?

grub --device-map=/dev/null --batch <<EOT
device (hd0) /dev/loop0
root (hd0,0)
EOT
Kano
08-07-2009, 12:14 PM
You forgot a few commands, as you loop mount the device then copy stage1/2 and THEN you use that grub command. Read better next time.
AHSauge
08-07-2009, 12:49 PM
All I know is, when I booted Fedora 11 and it decided to scan/verify my hard disk, the graphical boot just sat there like something in the background had locked up, with no status messages or anything. I removed "rhgb" from my grub.conf and that was the last of it. The text boot might not be as pretty, but at least it lets me know WTF is going on.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you can press 'esc' to switch to and from text mode when booting in graphics mode.
Louise
08-07-2009, 01:00 PM
You forgot a few commands, as you loop mount the device then copy stage1/2 and THEN you use that grub command. Read better next time.

I understood those, so I just pasted the part that I hadn't seen before.

What I don't understand is what happens when those 4 lines are executed.

Comparing the first 446 bytes of stage1 with first 446 bytes of MBR gives that they are not the same.

I would have expected that.