Adding support for top grub menu

Adding support for top grub menu

[Jarno Suni]

I have many operating systems in my computer and I use a top grub menu
in a separate partition to chainload boot loaders of  operating
systems. I think that practice is not supported well. I have made the
top menu by editing the grub.cfg of the dedicated partition manually.
I could avoid manual editing of grub.cfg, if I could give the custom
locations of what is currently read from /etc/grub.d/ and
/etc/default/grub to grub-mkconfig as command line arguments. (I think
I could use "mount --bind" already.)

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Re: Adding support for top grub menu

[Vladimir 'φ-coder/phcoder' Serbinenko]

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Jarno Suni wrote:
> I have many operating systems in my computer and I use a top grub menu
> in a separate partition to chainload boot loaders of  operating
> systems. I think that practice is not supported well. I have made the
> top menu by editing the grub.cfg of the dedicated partition manually.
> I could avoid manual editing of grub.cfg, if I could give the custom
> locations of what is currently read from /etc/grub.d/ and
> /etc/default/grub to grub-mkconfig as command line arguments. (I think
> I could use "mount --bind" already.)
>
>   
I don't understand what you're exactly saying but if you install
os-prober grub will discover other OS in update-grub.

-- 
Regards
Vladimir 'φ-coder/phcoder' Serbinenko



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Re: Adding support for top grub menu

[Jarno Suni]

2010/5/9 Vladimir 'φ-coder/phcoder' Serbinenko <phcoder@gmail.com>:

> I don't understand what you're exactly saying but if you install
> os-prober grub will discover other OS in update-grub.

But if you use os-prober, I suppose it finds all kernels installed in
all distributions and makes the grub menu too big. And the
distributions found by os-prober can not update the grub menu, when
they get new kernel.


I want to chainload grubs to make menus more tidy and modular, but
installing the top grub could be more elegant.

The top menu grub partition is independent of the operating system
installed so the menu would continue to exist even if all partitions
of all distributions and other operating systems were reformated; on
the other hand any linux distribution that has grub 2 could be used to
maintain the top grub. My approach uses chainloading grubs, but if I
have understood correctly, installing to boot sector of a partition is
not recommended.

-- 
http://www.iki.fi/8/

Re: Adding support for top grub menu

[Vladimir 'φ-coder/phcoder' Serbinenko]

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Jarno Suni wrote:
> 2010/5/9 Vladimir 'φ-coder/phcoder' Serbinenko <phcoder@gmail.com>:
>
>   
>> I don't understand what you're exactly saying but if you install
>> os-prober grub will discover other OS in update-grub.
>>     
>
> But if you use os-prober, I suppose it finds all kernels installed in
> all distributions and makes the grub menu too big. And the
> distributions found by os-prober can not update the grub menu, when
> they get new kernel.
>
>
> I want to chainload grubs to make menus more tidy and modular, but
> installing the top grub could be more elegant.
>
> The top menu grub partition is independent of the operating system
> installed so the menu would continue to exist even if all partitions
> of all distributions and other operating systems were reformated; on
> the other hand any linux distribution that has grub 2 could be used to
> maintain the top grub. My approach uses chainloading grubs, but if I
> have understood correctly, installing to boot sector of a partition is
> not recommended.
>
>   
For this case install tools to generate grub.cfg for each distro without
installing actual grub and then in main grub.cfg:

menuentry "OS 1" {
   search -s -l <label1>
   configfile /boot/grub/grub.cfg
}
...


-- 
Regards
Vladimir 'φ-coder/phcoder' Serbinenko



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Re: Adding support for top grub menu

[Jarno Suni]

2010/5/9 Vladimir 'φ-coder/phcoder' Serbinenko <phcoder@gmail.com>:
> Jarno Suni wrote:
>> 2010/5/9 Vladimir 'φ-coder/phcoder' Serbinenko <phcoder@gmail.com>:
>>
>>
>>> I don't understand what you're exactly saying but if you install
>>> os-prober grub will discover other OS in update-grub.
>>>
>>
>> But if you use os-prober, I suppose it finds all kernels installed in
>> all distributions and makes the grub menu too big. And the
>> distributions found by os-prober can not update the grub menu, when
>> they get new kernel.
>>
>>
>> I want to chainload grubs to make menus more tidy and modular, but
>> installing the top grub could be more elegant.
>>
>> The top menu grub partition is independent of the operating system
>> installed so the menu would continue to exist even if all partitions
>> of all distributions and other operating systems were reformated; on
>> the other hand any linux distribution that has grub 2 could be used to
>> maintain the top grub. My approach uses chainloading grubs, but if I
>> have understood correctly, installing to boot sector of a partition is
>> not recommended.
>>
>>
> For this case install tools to generate grub.cfg for each distro without
> installing actual grub and then in main grub.cfg:
>
> menuentry "OS 1" {
>   search -s -l <label1>
>   configfile /boot/grub/grub.cfg
> }
> ...

What would that do exactly? What is that <label1>?


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