GRUB 2 Receives New Font Engine

[phoronix]

Phoronix: GRUB 2 Receives New Font Engine

GRUB 2, the next-generation Linux boot loader, has received a new font engine. Version 2 of the GRand Unified Bootloader introduces this new font engine that's written in C and with a font tool in Java...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=Njk2Nw

[RealNC]

Too much overkill for "just" a bootloader, imo. GRUB 2 has seen too much overengineering.

[Vadi]

I hope they fix the error reporting. Nevermind that GRUB, being such an important program, doesn't give a solution to the user for helping fix the problem, it doesn't even say what the error is!

It's the ultimate horror situation for a newbie to be stuck with some "GRUB ERROR ##" and an unusable computer.

[DeepDayze]

I'd like a good bootloader that does its job well without so much fluff, yet having good error detection and handling

[yesterday]

Firstly, I believe GRUB2 will have better device detection and will support more filesystems than GRUB1. Secondly, I'm not sure how important error handling is. TBH, unless you are constantly reinstalling distros on your system, how often do you play around with GRUB confiugrations? More precisely, how often do you re-install grub on a partition? The newbie problem is better handled in the distor itself, making sure that sane and working options are set. Finally, the graphical component of GRUB2 was requested to allow for a better and more seamless desktop experience. Currently it is OK in GRUB1, with some SuSe hacks giving the best results. But after so long if the graphical aspect of grub isn't any nicer than GRUB1, then that would be an opportunity lost.

[IanW]

As I understand it (nb: I'm fairly noobish) Grub2 is a requirement for the move to ext4.

[yoshi314]

there are some unofficial patches for old grub as well, just google it.

as far as this news go - i'd rather see a stable release of grub2, and not bother with eye-candy.

[KellyClowers]

Grub2 is great, I have been using it since early last year, and had fewer problems than with grub1

[massysett]

Scripting support? Conditionals? Way too complicated. Meanwhile, Grub 1 recently failed on me because of its vaunted support for reading filesystems. I had installed a new system with ext3, and it had bigger inodes that Grub couldn't read. Of course it took awhile to figure this out. Meanwhile, what worked just fine? LILO! So right now I am having Grub chainload LILO.

If the choice is between this bloated Grub 2 and LILO, I will pick LILO.

[curaga]

There's been a patch for the bigger inodes for grub1 for a while.

I agree they should get a stable grub2 out and then start working on eyecandy if they want.