Re: Grub-0.95-diskless-patch-1 (Etherboot-5.3.8)

[Gilles van Ruymbeke]

Okuji,
Thanks for replying,
I CC the authors or contact people I know for grub4dos and grub4all.
I also wrote a post to the DOS forum where tinybit (grub4dos) was used to 
be active:
"http://denbbs.angelskyarea.com/YaBB.cgi?board=discuss;action=display;num=1087892282";
I hope that they will contact you about this copyright assignment issue
and that they will help you to decrease the overall entropy of the grub 
patches ...

I will give you now my understanding of the situation, but you should 
definitively
ask and get the right answers from the authors of these great patches:

I will not describe the network diskless patch from Feng Shuo,
as I understand it is already on the way to be integrated within Grub, 
Thank you !

The author of grub4dos is Tinybit from China Dos Union.
cf: 
"<http://newdos.yginfo.net/grubdos.htm%22>http://newdos.yginfo.net/grubdos.htm"; 
hosted by Wengier also from China Dos Union.
Grub4dos originally was a patch to make a Dos executable: Grub.exe.
Grub4dos also includes natively the capability to "map" and emulate a 
floppy, partition or disk image
and to boot from it, instead of using the memdisk kernel. I got some 
trouble with memdisk.
Tinybit added lately the capability to boot from the NT/XP boot loader: 
boot.ini+grldrstart+grldr.
grldrstart and grldr are the 2 Grub stages files used to boot from the NT 
boot loader.
NT/XP doesn't like to have Grub as a MBR, and this a very nice way to start 
grub without interfering with NT/XP.
Please find attached the Readme and ChangeLog of Grub4dos for more details.

Grub4all, done by "Gandalf", added  fsys_ntfs.c to Grub4dos
and bring the option to boot grub from a NTFS partition.
cf: 
"<https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?func=detailitem&item_id=9180%22>https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?func=detailitem&item_id=9180";
This allow a very clean boot of other OSes from a pre-configured NTFS XP 
machine.
No MBR change nor install required. Just add a line into the boot.ini and 
add 2 files within the NTFS partition.
I personally would remove XP, but in some cases this is not an option...
As an example it allows me to boot Knoppix from the HD using a loop-back 
file-system image
using Grub on an XP system without re-partitioning or changing anything 
within the boot sectors.
Very easy way to promote Linux within Windoze addicted companies... 
(besides the great Knoppix cdrom)

Hoping this will help you to integrate these patches within the next Grub 
releases,
I would like to thank again all the people involved in the development of Grub.
Best Regards, Gilles



At 02:08 PM 6/26/04 +0200, Yoshinori K. Okuji wrote:
> On Friday 25 June 2004 04:00, Gilles van Ruymbeke wrote:
> > What about grub4dos and grub4all ?
>
> The most important requirement is that we can contact the author. I need
> to ask the author to make a copyright assignment to the FSF, otherwise
> I cannot integrate it.
>
> Another thing is a clear explanation of *why and how it is useful*. If
> there is any description for this already, let me know where I should
> look.
>
> Okuji

CHNLOG.ZIP
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