grub-0.5.96.1 notes and 'b' vs <Enter> inconsistency

[Jay Wardle]

Hello,

I am quite impressed!  GRUB has so much more
functionality than LILO.  Linux Journal just had an
article about GRUB that inspired me to check it out.
I am converting my troubleshooting disks over now,
my hard disk loaders soon.  (Have to "teach" my family
how to use the GRUB menu.)

Some comments and suggestions about GRUB:

1.  I had trouble compiling GRUB on both of my Debian
systems. Initially, neither had libncurses5-dev installed,
but both did have libncurses5 installed (required as
part of base system).
configure had trouble realizing libncurses was there,
perhaps libncurses wasn't working right somehow....
Everything worked just fine after I installed the header
files with the libncurses5-dev package.

It is a noble effort to support compilation on systems
without the proper curses header files, but I'm not sure
that it is worth the extra effort.


2. It is a little confusing and seems inconsistent that
'b' boots when editing entries, but <Enter> boots when
in the menu.
Other actions such as getting a command line with 'c' or
editing the selection with 'e' seem consistently the
same in both cases.


3. A common boot manager feature is the ability to save
the previous MBR/boot program before or during installation.
Some even allow it to be restored later.

One common use of GRUB is to add lots of functionality
to an MSDOS formatted floppy.  It would be nice if
the MSDOS MBR could be saved to a file (bootsect.dos is
named in the sample menu.lst) that could be be used to boot
the floppy into MSDOS. I wanted that capability and had to
learn how to use dd to save the boot sector.  It would be
much nicer (and more Unified) if GRUB could do that for me.

A suggestion for a simple-to-use implementation that seems
in the spirit of other GRUB file commands:

        cp (fd0)+1 /boot/bootsect.dos


4. I would second the request for "more".  But I agree
with your answer that "more" isn't required functionality.



Thanks for a wonderful tool!

Regards,
Jay Wardle
15 April 2001